I can't help but feel that having been "gifted and talented," apparently a near universal experience here, is part of why this identification has been so easy. Perhaps going forward, with the academic achievers tilting more female, to or slightly beyond parity, will make this less likely.
Oh, skin care. After working at the notorious compulsive-commercial-femininity temple that is a top-tier Manhattan spa, I was finally bullied into two ladylike regimes: summer pedicures and expensive facial cleanser. I didn't do it for the dudes; I did it because ladies just wouldn't talk to me!
I'm actually thinking of doing a spa day sometime soon. I'm so unfamiliar with all the beauty routines that the thought of being fussed over and polished by people who know what they're doing for once seems interesting, in a 'who knows, maybe I'll like it' kind of way.
1: Doesn't work for me -- I was feeling that way in a selective high school that had until recently (10-15 years?) been a girls school. I wasn't associating with 'my academic peers' or anything, I just couldn't keep up with the girls socially.
3: Great. Y'all are turning LB into a girl.
Oh, I don't come off as butch as I write. I manage to look fairly femme these days on a beauty routine that consists of showering, mostly.
I accidentally showed up for school one day in eleventh grade or so looking rather well-turned out for once by Eighties standards. A bunch of popular girls were uncharacteristically friendly, coming over to me to chat, when we normally had no social contact at all. When I figured out that the willingness to speak to me was a response to the outfit, I was so horrified I wore only LL Bean turtlenecks and jeans for a couple of weeks.)
In middle school I once showed up dressed like the other guys - similar jeans and similarly designed shirt, neither of which I'd worn before - and people commented on how I was dressed "normally" for once. I never dressed that way again. I think the stakes were lower for guys because I was also never picked on for how I dressed, either.
LB: I do want to warn you that getting a spa facial (not the other kind) can be really relaxing and fun, but do be prepared for the heavy sell. When I worked at that spa, I'd go to training sessions in which a rich marketing guy would encourage all the aestheticians to *mock* whatever the client used for facial cleanser so she'd buy product. They don't make much on the services, so they push product like crazy. If you can steel yourself against that, it can be a really nice and even self-affirming experience of like, "I, too, deserve teh fancy."
3 - I've gotten kind of hooked on summer pedicures. I like having pretty toes. I have very ticklish feet, though, and am certain I'm going to accidentally kick one of the ladies in the face à la The 40 Year Old Virgin one of these days and be horrified.
eb -- I wasn't picked on or anything, just ignored.
I manage to look fairly femme these days on a beauty routine that consists of showering, mostly.
It's not how you look that matters. It's that now you'll hang out with your new girl friends from the spa and won't hang out with us in our secret He-Man Women Hater's Club in the treehouse. Once again, feminists ruin America.
I'm pretty sure I know at least one girl who is friends with exclusively males because she's misogynist. Really. She seems to feed on male attention and view all other women as competition. Doesn't anyone else know someone like this?
Waitaminute. LL Bean wasn't "well-turned out" in the 1980s?
10: Ah, ok. I think I was ignored, too. But I wasn't really paying much attention (except for that day when I got it).
In response to 11 (and the original post) I see nobody has mentioned that, "It's a Man's, Man's, Man's, Man's Interweb"
I get along best with women who get along best with men.
I wasn't exactly a tomboy (I default to femme), but I was the girl that knew that girls weren't good at science and said fuck it and was good at science anyway and had more boy friends than girl friends because the girls were all smarmy little airheads.
(This may be misogyny.)
I don't think it always leads to misogyny, but it can, especially in older female academics, who dealt with real misogyny in the course of their careers. (Writing a brilliant critique or inventing a new field; being called Miss X and ignored when accolades came about.) They don't hate other women, exactly, but they have no patience for any sort of femininity or weakness (often defined as 'wanting time off for kids or family.')
I get along best with women who get along best with men.
I get along best with women who get along best with me.
I get along best with all y'all's moms.
Dontcha wish your girlfriend was easy-to-get-along-with like me? Dontcha? Dontcha? Oh, you don't. Sorry.
I find it totally amusing that I'm supposed to be the femmey one here. I think we need to start breaking down these femme/tomboy divides according to region and social class.
Anyway. I think that happening to be a token woman isn't misogynist, but being proud of it is. (Perfectly willing to cop to having that hangup myself from time to time.) Then again, one of my favorite academic talks evah was one by a quiet feminist scholar at a mid-level liberal arts college who did a fascinating reading of Wollestonecraft and ended the talk by saying that if we don't acknowledge our own misogyny, we're never going to get anywhere.
if we don't acknowledge our own misogyny, we're never going to get anywhere
If these comments are an indication of the results of that reflection, I'm not sure where you expect to get. Seems self-reinforcing to me.
Not following you. Or, at least, I'm understanding you to say that these comments are misogynistic, and I'm not getting it.
I think that happening to be a token woman isn't misogynist, but being proud of it is.
Or it's a totally rational position, say, circa fifth grade, to the airheads with poorly applied blue eyeshadow who didn't want to wire a circuit because Joey wouldn't like them. Maybe it's misogynist to think they're airheads, but it's not my fault they were idiots.
Seriously, though, I'm not sure it's wrong to be proud of it; token women have had to put up with a lot of shit, and it's not wrong that they feel proud for persevering. What does seem to be wrong, however, is feeling superior to other women, which isn't the same as feeling proud.
23: I think that the token woman role, as AWB and Silvana said, has a fair bit of misogyny in it, yeah. Other than that I'm not sure why (or whether) I've pissed off you, ac, and Cala.
22: I don't think I understand what you're saying, but I think you sound (or find my comments) hostile? I don't understand why.
24: I do think it's misogynistic, fifth grade or no, to think of girls as airheads and idiots, yes. I get on PK's case when he says shit like that; I'm certainly going to object to it when adults do it. I don't see a meaningful distinction between pride/superiority in this use--I can see being proud of one's achievements, but not being proud of the token status. If anything, I would think one would be very sad and lonely about it.
Oh, I'm not upset. I agree it's misogynist, but at that age the options were a) try to fit in with the girls with whom I had nothing in common (probably would have required me failing a few science/math courses and giving a damn about Teen or whatever airheaded young actor was hot) or b) enjoying my interests, which means running with the boys and at least having some friends. And quite a few of them were bright up until fifth grade when there was a fair amount of pressure to act like a ditz and wait for your breasts to grow, because science was harrrrd.
Now I know that probably wasn't their fault, but at the time believing that it wasn't inevitable probably kept me from giving up.
Adhering to b) lead to being a token, but being b) was certainly being truer to myself (and harder) than doing badly so the boys would like me would have been. In that context, just achieving means you're a token. Something to be proud of.
Whew, I'm glad.
It's interesting; at that age, I didn't really hate those girls, I just was kind of puzzled by them. But yeah, I get what you're saying now.
God I am so tired.
I'm not getting where the mysogyny comes in--women preferring like minded individuals doing things that women can do. I can sort of sense the argument about mysogyny, but I can't really see it unless you're arguing that anything women have been forced to do in the past is now an essentially part of womanhood.
doing badly so the boys would like me would have been.
Did you grow up in a very conservative state? I think I'm a decade older than you, and I don't remember anything like that in high school. Thinking back, the guys with the most pull were athletes, and I'm almost certain that some of them dated for brains--I know of at least one who's girlfriend helped on (and occassionally did) his homework.
until fifth grade when there was a fair amount of pressure to act like a ditz and wait for your breasts to grow, because science was harrrrd.
That sounds like a super sucky environment.
Echoing SCMT (who is about my age), here: In high school or before, I never encountered the idea that a girl had to appear ditzy to attract boys. Whenever I hear about this phenomenon I just assume it died out in the 50s. Evidently it didn't.
25: You haven't pissed me off, and I can certainly agree that generally thinking women are airheads is misogynist (it's pretty much the definition) or seeking out a position as the token woman out of a desire for status or dislike for women is as well. Ac seemed to be saying that this comment thread was in itself misogynist, and that I didn't get.
I grew up in a relatively conservative area. (Our memorial day parade this year was lined with Santorum balloons.) Oddly enough, in high school it wasn't nearly as bad, but fifth grade seemed to be the year when everyone was taking their cues from teen magazines rather than reality.
I can't really see it unless you're arguing that anything women have been forced to do in the past is now an essentially part of womanhood.
Nah, you don't need that. The misogyny comes in, when it does, when women who have 'made it' in a nearly all-male environment disdain those women who haven't succeeded for being weak or subject to social pressure.
Tim, it's not so much because women were forced to do stuff--that's too simple. It's that X, Y, and Z were socially-approved feminine traits, so women who didn't correspond to them were not socially approved. And as a result, those of us who weren't properly femmey mistook the symbol for the content, if that makes sense: we hated the girly girls because of their girlyness, rather than recognizing that, like everyone else in the entire world, some of the girly girls were perfectly fine people, and some of them weren't, and if they were being girly girls because of social pressure, they were as much victims of that (limiting themselves to get approval) as we were (not getting approval, and resenting those who did).
DA, fwiw, I don't think it's so much that girls had to behave that way as that a lot of them did, because femminess is (still) a safer route to approval for girls than not-femminess. Certainly the majority of the little girls in PK's kindergarten class are pretty femmey.
LB, thanks. I think I'm just getting tone all wrong today and feeling generally beseiged by too much taking-care-of-PK-so_Mr.B-can-get-stuff-done, combined with getting-stuff-done-myself. I need a good night's sleep.
Why is it that supposedly stupid women's heads are full of air, while supposedly stupid men's heads are full of meat?
The misogyny comes in, when it does, when women who have 'made it' in a nearly all-male environment disdain those women who haven't succeeded for being weak or subject to social pressure.
That I can see and have seen. (And seriously--Jeebus.) But I have great faith in Generation Awesome. I now meet more and more women in positions of power who are inclined to recognize these burdens. It just seems like a pyramid: the first set of women to make it are just crushed, and not inclined to be forgiving of anything less than total committment, then next generation less so, and so on. And, indeed, with more and more women in the workplace, I have seen earlier generations of women seem to loosen up on the toughness. It's pretty cool.
Haven't you seen that Burger King ad, Adam?
You should write 'IKEA' on your bed. That would make everything better.
lined with Santorum balloons
Thank god I finished swallowing a mouthful of tea before I read that.
Certainly the majority of the little girls in PK's kindergarten class are pretty femmey.
Things seem to be getting more rather than less exaggerated in this respect -- all the little girls my wife used to look after and the kids of various relatives seem much more exaggerately femmey than I remember my sister or any of her friends being when we were little.
34: Yeah, I think things are changing too. What I notice (I think) is that young men seem just a lot less hung up and a lot more accepting of women as women than I think they used to.
It's weird to occasionally think that one's own feminism may occasionally be fighting dragons that are becoming an endangered species.
38: Yeah, I think it's a weird warping of this girl power/3rd wave stuff. OTOH, it might also be that, thanks to the 3rd wave, we're getting past the idea that boy things = high status, and therefore both girls and boys should be not-femmey. At least, I'm really proud of PK (in a perverse way) for being offended by, and defensive about, the idea that boys can too wear pink.
I'm with ttaM on 38 -- while I had trouble with the required level of femminess in high school, I don't remember the pink&sparkliness being nearly as pervasive for little girls when I was a kid as it is for Sally's peers. I don't know how much to worry about it, but they're certainly almost totally socially segregated from boys, which I don't think is either innate or a particularly good thing.
What are we meaning here by femme? (Just curious. No large point.)
40: See, there's nothing wrong with the pink, but IME the pink goes with the segregation and the rigid gender roles.
I think it varies, but generally I'd say femme = high maintenance appearance stuff: dresses on little girls, eye-catching shoes, clothes that are sparkly or affect delicacy; for women, the salon/spa stuff, heels, dry-clean only clothes, makeup. Etc.
I will say that, at least at PK's school, the femmey girls stuff isn't inherently impractical--the girls wear the same solidly-built thick-soled sandals as the boys do, but the girls' are in pinks and purples and have sparkly things on them, whereas the boys are more neutrally-colored. (When he was littler, I'd put PK in the brighter colored ones b/c I think brown on little kids is boring, damnit.)
42: Behaving in a stereotypically feminine manner. For little girls, bedizened in the latest tulle Disney Princess gear.
43: It does, and I'm bothered by that (as is PK).
LB, what do you think of the "boys suck" or "girls rule" stuff on little kids' clothes?
femmey girls stuff isn't inherently impractical--the girls wear the same solidly-built thick-soled sandals as the boys do
Are you checking it out in detail? IME, shoes, particularly, where the difference is only in the color and sparkliness are the exception rather than the rule. If I let Sally pick out the color shoes she wants, I have to watch like a hawk to make sure that they aren't slippery-soled and unstable.
You can find sparkly and practical, but you have to be really careful about your shopping.
Doesn't how femme girls are depend very much on their mothers?
I'm not sure what I think of femme clothing. (Disney princess will be banned in the restored calaphate.) Which, full disclosure, is most of my warddrobe. I tend to view clothes as costumes though, not really personality statements, so it sort of varies with whether I'm giving a damn or not.
I don't pull off butch well, though. Wrong body type.
47: Bogus and offensive. The fact that it's cute indicates low status -- if it mattered what girls thought about boys, the shirts would be offensive and wouldn't exist. (Or, if I'm wrong about that, then they're just straight out offensive.)
Certainly the majority of the little girls in PK's kindergarten class are pretty femmey
I'm wondering now why my experience seems so atypical. Of course we played with Barbies and whatnot, but girls very seldom (if ever) wore dresses when I was in elementary school. The only girls who wore skirts or dresses were girls from families that had just immigrated.
I'm wondering if it's a class thing. In grade 8, almost every girl in my class had short hair, and when I went to the middle-class part of the city once a week for the gifted program one of the things that struck me weird was that the girls from these wealthier families all had long hair. And wore skirts.
I could be wrong about this, but has anyone else noticed that women's clothes have become more "femmey" in the last ten years?
48: No, I see the shoes in the store. But you know where I live. Feminism is rooted here in different ways than it is there.
49: It probably does, but I'm not sure it's as simple as "femme mom = femme girl" or vice-versa.
49: Actually, we've got a weird ethnicity dynamic going on. I'm not particularly femme (although I go to work everyday in business clothes, which require femininity); Nancy, the Columbian babysitter, is way, way femme (in a tasteful and dignified fashion). Sally has explained to me that English people aren't girly and Spanish people are -- I've tried to straighten her out on that, that she's comparing me and Nancy, not Anglophones and Hispanophones generally, but I don't think she's buying it.
It's also not just the home -- peer pressure is huge.
Disney princesses are okay in moderation: dressing up and being sparkly is fine. Boys should be able to do it too (and I suspect part of the popularity of pirates is just b/c of that).
Where I used to live, there were a lot of perfectly great solid-colored all-cotton jumper-type dresses with tights outfits on girls that were, by my accounts, just fine. I bought some for PK when he was littler, in fact, b/c they were cute, damnit, and I didn't care if he was a boy. (Plus, dresses are easier to change diapers in, whereas tights are warmer under cotton pants than just socks.) Here, femminess seems more working-class than middle- or professiona-class; at least, femminess of a certain type. My very excellent lesbian colleagues dress their kids in the solid-colored cotton-jumper with tights stuff when they aren't wearing pants and t-shirts. Whereas PK's school peers are more likely to wear things that have Disney princess or Dora on them.
Dunno about femme adult women's clothing. The last few years have been very schizo: gypsies tramps and thieves for a while, and then also the tailored classic retro stuff (which I favor).
50 - I agree that all of this princess stuff is out of control but I'm also wary of the other extreme. My parents banned Barbies from the house, only bought me unisex clothing, and bought me shit like Tonka trucks instead of the toys I asked for (under the thinking that "boy stuff" was more nongendered) and it really pissed me off and, I think, has something to do with why I view other women as foreign creatures and can't really relate to them socially (and, honestly, am kinda scared of and intimidated by them). I suppose their experiment worked in that I ended up in a male-dominated profession, etc. but I sometimes wonder at what cost. (Also, remember, my parents are both psychologists.)
49: I do think that, broadly speaking, Latinas are more femmey than anglos (anglas?). But I think that American feminism, compared to other feminisms, has been a lot more hung up with eschewing femininity--which I think has something to do with American culture being hyper anxious about masculinity. (And yes, I really do think that.)
56: Did they call your crib the "Becks box"?
56: That's the problem. Where normal, for a girl, gets defined as avoiding anything tagged as male, you end up walking a fine line between raising your daughter as a social outcast who despises other women (not good), or as a manicure-obsessed nitwit in shoes that will break your legs. (I know I sound obsessive about the shoes, but I was in the park with Sally and Newt yesterday watching a bunch of older girls (9? 10?) playing in slides. They were trying to run around, and ended up taking their shoes off and playing barefoot in an NYC concrete playground, which meant that they still couldn't run. The boys were in sneakers, and were running.) You can't accept the femme shit without serious editing, but you can't keep your daughter away from it either.
I remember my sister having femmey things -- but they were dress-up or for special occasions like birthdays. Other than that, what she wore was largely indistinguishable from what I wore. At least until we were school age and even then, outside school, there wasn't a huge difference until we were quite a bit older.
I don't think that's so much the case now.
I could be wrong about this, but has anyone else noticed that women's clothes have become more "femmey" in the last ten years?
I think so, but I was a teenager in the 80s and early 90s and most of the girls I hung out with were either into the indie thing -- Dr Martin's, etc -- or costumey goth stuff. The student 'uniform' at college was way way less femmey than what people currently wear.
re: 54 Yeah. My wife is pretty femme -- the whole eastern european thing. There are, it seems to my superficial eyes, cultural/ethnic differences and I'm not sure that certain clothes signify the same thing in say Prague versus Glasgow.
Oh, Barbies are fine. Dressing up is fine. Pirates rule. I just loathe the princess line.
I've noticed lately that pink seems to have become a more masculine color, at least in some circles. When I was in college every young man owned a cornflower blue shirt; now a lot of them seem to own a deep rose shirt. I associate as a Latino thing, except that there seem to be more anglo men wearing pink. Probably not in the office, but it seems to be true socially.
57: I think this is right: that there's nothing wrong with femme stuff generally. What's wrong is the rigid division.
Sally has explained to me that English people aren't girly and Spanish people are -- I've tried to straighten her out on that, that she's comparing me and Nancy, not Anglophones and Hispanophones generally, but I don't think she's buying it.
It varies, of course, but my experience tends to confirm her observation. At least, Hispanics tend to be significantly more femme than Anglos (who can of course be femme as well).
On preview I see that b has said something similar.
normal, for a girl, gets defined as avoiding anything tagged as male
See, it seems to me the opposite: girls can wear girls' stuff or boys' stuff, but god forbid a boy want something that isn't brown or khaki-colored. Orange seems to be about the only acceptable boys' color nowadays.
You're an adult. I'm talking about little kids.
Although! It's true, I frequently find that I point PK to adult men to show him that yes, men do sometimes have long hair/wear pink/wear jewelry/whatever. People seem more hung up about gender in small kids than they do about gender in adults, which is backwards (if being hung up about gender makes any sense at all, that is).
Or maybe it's just that the hung up people are more likely to have kids?
64: You're right that the fashion controls are tighter on boys than on girls (Nancy keeps on hiding a pair of *white* shorts Newt likes. White isn't butch enough. Jesus. And yes, Sally's stereotype is more accurate than not, I was just trying to discourage the stereotyping process.). But for pastimes, it's pretty hardline segregated. Girls can do organized athletic stuff, but there's no kicking a ball around with the boys in my neighborhood -- kids playing outside are in single-sex groups.
I was responding to Cala's 61, b. Not everything is about you.
Doesn't how femme girls are depend very much on their mothers?
It's sort of dependent on the mothers, but not entirely. My mom is very femme; apparently her first comment on learning she was pregnant with me was 'I hope I have a little girl so I can dress her up in pretty clothes.' But she's not femme in a terribly high maintenance sense; she's striking beautiful, and wore makeup, but it was all minimal over the counter makeup, not expensive facials and spas. A very midwestern femme.
But it didn't take, exactly, with all of us. I am not as femme as my mom; I rebelled against makeup for a long time and I still don't wear foundation ever. One of my sisters has traditionalist attitudes but is way more butch than me. The youngest two are ridiculously femme, one with a cutesy vibe and one with a calabat vibe.
And we're all probably butch compared to the South, where I swear women must get manicures so they can shop for groceries.
Deep rose is such a lovely color.
EB, that's true; boys can also wear gray. And navy. God, it's like little boys are supposed to be morose all the time, or something.
Re: 68
I think a fair bit of "feminine" style stuff is countersignaling. Think of the pink-polo wearing frat boy or the long haired athlete. In little kids, there is no externally masculine factors to counter-signal against, so any sort of feminine behavior is just read as straight up teh ghey.
70: Mean! I had somehow missed Cala's 61.
71: These days I think of (and describe) myself as ultra-femmey, but a couple of people I've met from the blog (and my boyfriend) all say I'm actually much more granola than I realize. I think midwestern femminess is weird.
I think 74 is true.
76: Oh, so you're just pulling my pigtails? So typically boy.
75: It is. It's like, be femme, but let's be sensible about it. So, while it drove my mother crazy that I didn't want to wear makeup, had I awakened at 5 every day to straighten my hair and put on tons of makeup, she would have gently told me it wasn't necessary because I needed my sleep.
This did lead to a few sorts of 'why don't you look like susie Q' conversations; I don't thiink I realized until college how much work my classmates had put in on their appearance. I had just assumed they were naturally prettier. (Perhaps true, but not for the reasons I thought.)
My mother hasn't done anything about the proliferation of sparkly flipflops breeding in my sister's bedroom, though.
My parents never had a problem with me playing with the toy mice my sister played with as a kid (she even had a dollhouse set up for the mice, which were dressed up like people). I probably spent less time playing with action figures than with any other toy. I probably spent the most time with board or video games, though.
Also, if I had insisted I needed designer face creams or washes, my mom probably would have never heard of them. Midwest femme is strange.
75: There are all sorts of different scales. I look much less femme in an office environment than I do visiting Buck's family on a western PA farm. Law-firm femme is about being precisely turned out and polished -- disheveled is non-femme. In western PA, disheveled is fine, and long hair and tits are all the visual signifiers of femininity I need to show up with, so as long as I don't say anything surprising, I'm fine. If I showed up with hair and nails done to the nines, I'd look intimidating, which might come off as less, rather than more, feminine.
the toy mice my sister played with as a kid (she even had a dollhouse set up for the mice, which were dressed up like people)
OMG, were those the little mice that stood up and, if memory serves, were actually made of fur, and you could get them in all sorts of outrageous little outfits? My sister collected those, too. I haven't seen them as an adult, but if I ever find them I'm sure PK is going to go nuts for them.
Oh, we had those too! And we put them in a dollhouse.
We didn't bother with the dollhouse, but she kept them all on a shelf. God, those were cute.
My sister loved tucking the baby mouse into the bed. I had some really great little dollhouse pieces: porcelain washbowls, that sort of thing.
I don't remember if the mice were made of real fur - not having developed an interest in authenticity at the time - but they at least had fake fur, stood up, and had outfits. I seem to remember them being already dressed so I don't know if you could change them. She probably gave all the mice away, but I'm pretty sure she saved the house.
You could always get PK taxidermied mice that are all dressed up and pretty.
I spent an inordinate amount of time playing with G.I Joes. But that wasn't playing, it was setting up ambushes. I'm not a girl.
nice, Becks. I like the St. Sebastian one best. Though really, one should collect them all.
56: I'm not sure I would go as far as your parents, and you're (obv.) best suited to see both the benefits and the costs, so maybe it was all a bit of a mistake, but you seem to have turned out pretty well (or you fake it well), and I still think your parents are awesome.
I can sort of guess at ac's complaint (#22), mostly because I've been on the other side when we've had similar debates before. And I think she's turned me around a bit. There's nothing inherently wrong with femme--I just don't really get it, so it's not a very useful trait a woman to have as regards me. But structuring gender around my wants is probably not the best idea; I simply don't have the time to hang out with that many women.
So I demand only a tithe: 10% of all women should be not-femme. The rest may do as they like.
86: Right, the clothes were sort of glued on or whatever. They had little ethnic costumes, or professional costumes, or just cute outfits of whatever sort. All rather elaborately detailed.
Those taxidermied mice are a little disturbing.
My mother, perhaps in an attempt to subvert traditional gender stereotypes, bought dolls for both my brother and myself when we were little ("girly" dolls, not G.I. Joe dolls). To her disappointment, we would make them fight like any other action figure. She really just wanted a daughter, I think.
I bought PK a doll or two. Unsurprisingly, he was as uninterested in his dolls as I was in mine when I was a kid. I didn't make mine fight, though; I stuck pins in them.
His dad had a favorite doll, though. But then Germans are freaks.
93: My son loved all sorts of dress-up stuff when he was younger. He'd routinely go to preschool in shorts, t-shirt, cowboy boots, and a cape. Or a pirate shirt and a cape. Or almost anything and a cape, really. Now (at 10) he's reluctant to wear his styling new pink shirt when he thinks his friends might see him. But it's still cool with his cousins.
We weren't really interested in the dolls themselves either (even the GI Joe's), except in their ability to be incorporated into our broader fort-building activities. Man, that's how you really keep a kid occupied: give them a big bin of wooden blocks. And that sort of stuff is pretty much a blank slate--no inherent gender issues there.
95: Yup. Or Legos. PK is really into the Legos.
I used to looove building forts in the living room out of blankets and cushions from the couch. I should so build a fort in the living room some rainy day. Will have to find a likeminded person to build the fort with, though. Forts are much more fun when shared. Ideally, you should have at least one person to build the fort with and one person who disapproves of the fort-building (like a parent) to make it all the more satisfying. At least, that's what I recall from my childhood.
I'm game for cushion forts.
That reminds me: BRIO. I also had an engineer outfit when I was really young.
OMG! I suspect Standpipe would be the best cushion fort builder evah!
I'm so disappointed that PK doesn't really play with the Brio stuff much! BTW, Brio purchased Plan Toys, which made the most fabulous (non-train) wood toy stuff of all sorts.
Wood toys suck. Except for Lincoln Logs.
Lincoln Logs suck. You just can't build as many things out of them as Legos or good old-fashioned blocks.
Tim, seriously. What is wrong with you?
I want to hear Tim's case for Lincoln Logs.
Wrong with me? WRONG WITH ME! Blocks are chunky, and demand oversized buildings. Lincoln Logs have notches that are satisfying to put together. And unlike Legos buildings, Lincoln Log forts explode when bombed with marbles.
Your original claim was wood toys v. Lincoln Logs, not Legos v. Lincoln Logs.
What about Tinker Toys? That's a good wooden toy.
You know what's neat, along the Tinker Toy line, is Zome.
But! The notches limit your architectural options. You can only build tall, square structures. No cute little patio or chimneys. And they're all brown! You can't have fun with the colors. I'm with you on Legos not being as satisfying to knock down as non-notched building materials. I have now decided I am a wooden block triumphialist.
I am a precog, and knew that Becks would want an answer. Her claim regarded blocks and Legos.
Wood toys--what's the point, beyond giving the parents the comforting feeling that they live in some patchouli scented Whole Foods? They're anachronisms in this modern world, and an indication of some bizarre unwillingness to engage childhood as it is today, with its myriad forms of plastic play.
I never liked Tinker Toys. The sticks and holes were always slightly different sizes. Either they wouldn't stay in because they were too loose or you couldn't get them to fit together because they were too tight.
(A preemptive "ATM")
I make my kids build things out of broken glass and thumbtacks.
You know me well, Tim. (And I never thanked you for 90 -- that was sweet. You're still totally wrong about the Lincoln Logs, though.)
I was never all that interested in Legos or Lincoln Logs. I did have a plastic race track for toy cars that you put on a staircase and set up so that the car would go through a loop and off a ramp. That got boring quickly so I sent marbles down the track and had them jump into an empty coffee can. It was very, very loud.
I have now decided I am a wooden block triumphialist.
Wooden blocks are chunky, and lack the elegant grace of the lincoln log. Kids who play with them will lack the fineness of finger articulation that lincoln log players will enjoy in later life. But, hey, someone needs to be the kid everyone else picks on.
Cushion forts are awesome. Now that you've got me thinking about forts, I recall that though I'm an only child, and had my own room, I made a fort in the closet in my room, shut the door, and hung out in there. That's fucked up. They should have seen "will hang out with computer strangers" coming twenty years ago.
Legos, it should be noted, suck. It's much more fun to build with stuff that you have to use some imagination and ingenuity to get to stand up, with the precariousness being part of the fun. This is not an erection joke.
You would, apo. PK builds his own toys out of organic hemp and dried leaves. And then we meditate on how grateful we are for all the things the good earth has given us, just as we do before every meal of sustainably harvested oats and pure rain water.
Gawd, I hate the words femme and femmy.
When I was very little, I was something of a tom boy. My hair was cut by a barber, and I had osh kosh bgosh overralls. I even had striped ones with a train engineer's hat. When I was 5 or 6, though, I decided that I wanted hair that waslong enough to pull back in a ponty tail, and that I wanted to be able to put my hair in a bun for ballet recitals.
The girls in my grade school wore corduroy pants and plaid skirts with tights. There was no head tossing. High school was weird, because there were girls who wouldn't leave the dorm without massive makeup, because then boy swould see them. There were also grungy types who barely bothered to groom themselves before going to breakfast. There were a lot of blazers in highschool, because that's what girls had to wear when they wore pants.
My Dad is almost a misandrist. He doesn't really like spending time with men. All of his best friends have been women. He doesn't liek the competitive one upsmansip that's common in a lot of male friendships, and he's not interested in sports (unless his daughter is competing in them. He likes watching a race or a field hockey game in crisp fall weather. He can't stand watching football.)
I think that I remember those mice dolls. Were there other animals too?
My parents liekd toys that required imagination--blocks and erector sets. They bought me a doll's house, and the furniture in it was very nice. The bathroom set was very old-fashioned; the tub had claws, and the toilet had a chain. It wasn't girly; it was tasteful decorating. I did ask for a Barbie. I got the pool set and a car. My Dad didn't like that so much, but he would have been glad for me to play with dolls id I wanted to. My Dad's idea of cute on a little girl was Mary Janes and saddle shoes. I did get kid perfume and a jewelry box.
Around the second-grade or so everyone decided that boys had cooties. This nevermade sense to me, and I didn't like losing my boy friends, but I faxed it (badly), snce I seemed to be the only one who didn't findboys gross and vice versa.
>Legos, it should be noted, suck.
This is the most wrong thing you have ever said.
I think the trick with Legos, people, is to move past building solid rectangular constructions with them.
Ok ok, they don't suck, and I liked building with just about anything, but they always kinda annoyed me.
I think we should ban Ogged until he updates his blog.
Whew!
Never piss off World Jewry, I always say.
My parents loved Lincoln logs. I had two large bins of them. I didn't have the coole extras that allowed you to buidl special structurs--no fence ofr the cowboys. (They did suck for a while when they came out with a cheapo version, but the good ones seem to be back.)
Erector sets were not available, when I was little.
For one of my birthday parties everyone got hot wheels as party favors.
Or is this not the thread to bait Farber?
121: Right on. I mourn the fact that I'm at an age where sitting on the living room floor playing with Legos for hours on end is somewhat less acceptable.
You know what's awesome? Playmobil.
You're just baiting people, teo. It's well-known that Playmobil is the favored toy of future serial killers. And, really, after being confronted for years with those inane painted smiles, you can't really blame the kids.
Playmobil is both awesome and disturbing.
Never piss off World Jewry, I always say.
They'll freeze your bank accounts, y'know.
I had to look up Playmobil. I sort of recognize the design, but don't think I ever played with them.
Okay, Tim, one, Playmobil is made of plastic. And two, Playmobil is THE BEST. My best friend and I have commisserated over how frustrating it is to be obsessed with not losing the little pieces, down to the goddamn eentsy pirate doubloons and the fucking cuffs (why must the cuffs be detachable? Jesus!). And yet. Playmobil totally rules.
That's it, Tim, your bank account is frozen.
Playmobil! We had a LOT of Playmobil. That shit just wasn't all that fun, and was crazy expensive, but my little brother and sister could not get enough of it.
My one beef with Playmobil is you used to be able to get the little Playmobil "multicultural" kit with different skintones, but no more. That and the cannibal/African savage/whatever it is set is gross.
On the other hand, it's really cool to be able to swap the hair so that the (always rather busty) female figures have short hair, and the flat-chested figures have long hair, making them either flat-chested women or long-haired men. You can even give the women beards.
I had some playmobil stuff, but I never got too into it--not much point to it all. And it seemed a bit too much like those miniature Christmas Villages with everyone frozen in time, from the skaters on the pond to Santa and his reindeer. Kinda creepy. Really, wooden blocks are where it's at. Block forts look pretty damn awesome when you line those little green army men up on the ramparts.
B understands. The rest of y'all seem to want frozen bank accounts too.
Actually, Playmobil does make advent calendars. A new one every year. Alas, they all end with Santa, so we've got several of them floating around, which is kind of odd. The up side is that not all the Santas look alike.
Playmobil was pretty cool.
Also awesome: Mr. Potatohead.
I liked Playdoh a lot too. The hair-dressing set (you got to grow he hair) was pretty damn cool.
I was fond of toys that seemed to have real-world applications. I liked my cvash register a lot and used it for my lemonade tsand. The snoopy slurpee maker was also great. I really wanyed the Jello Pudding pop set.
140: Do I get to dip into any of those accounts? B/c that would be cool.
142: BG, except for the Playmobil thing, you have perverse toy preferences. The playdoh set where you grow hair is just awful. It only does one thing.
I'll give you a pass on the cash register, though. Barely. But the other stuff? Boring.
Potatohead & Playdoh: excellent calls, BG.
My favorite toys as a kid were the Breyer horses. I'm kind of disturbed that there's a Barbaro horse now, though, and tempted to make jokes about broken legs.
I should really ship all my Breyer horses (an entire underbed bin of them) to my horsey niece.
I have the Lite Brite jingle stuck in my head. Also I really liked jello pudding pops, but as sweets, not toys.
I'd have to check with the Elders, b. It might be against the Protocols.
148: Fair enough. After all, I'm a big fan of the Playmobil Nativity sets, that's gotta count against me.
I'd have to check with the Elders, b. It might be against the Protocols.
Faker. There are no more Elders. Instead, World Jewry is organized in classic corporate form, with a board of elected directors that oversees a day-to-day chief known as the Head Heeb. And yes, he blogs.
And just who do you think those directors are, Tim?
I didn't spend much time with toys as a kid. I had Legos, Lite-Brite, and the rest but the novelty wore off really quickly. When I wasn't climbing trees and exploring creeks, it was mostly books and puzzles.
I do remember really, really wanting a Stretch Armstrong (whose novelty would surely have worn off even faster), and it nearly killed me not to own one of these.
There are no more Elders.
Sure there are. They're just Mormons now.
I don't thin that I ever owmed the Playdoh hair salon, but I played with it at someone elses house, so it never lost its allure. Playdoh was generally cool, though, cause you got to make stuff.
Silly putty was also great.
My glow-in-the dark frisbee was awesome.
One girl I knew had buildings from Mr. Rogers Make-believe Land. I really wanted the trolley car.
2: "I didn't do it for the dudes; I did it because ladies just wouldn't talk to me!"
Actually, all my life that's struck me as the primary reason most women do most of that stuff.
Not to please men; I tend to think most men could take or leave most female beauty routines and makeup; but to meet the expectations of other women.
What astounds me is that you'd think it was otherwise.
Most of the "beauty industry" strikes me as a scam sold to women. Men have little to do with it (save to profit off it; not that they can tell one cream or blush or whatever from it from another, I mean). This surely shouldn't be revelatory?
I'm not qualified to talk about this subject; I've been highly attracted to women with nice hair on their legs, and elsewhere, so what do I know?
Ignore me.
I was disappointed to discover that play-doh doesn't smell like play-doh anymore. They changed the scent and that's just wrong. It should have that earthy, salty smell, not some floral crap.
They also changed the scent of Johnson's Baby Shampoo. Whoever did that should be lashed.
Truly gros: Strawberry Shortcake and her smelly friends.
Lite Brite ruled I wanted to fill an entire screen with colors going in order so that I could get diagonals of the different colors by putting in te different colors in rainbow order. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue and then purple. Down and across, and then following all of the colors of the rainbow from each of the colors. I never had enough of the colored plastic bits to do it.
They also changed the scent of Johnson's Baby Shampoo. Whoever did that should be lashed.
Until they cry.
Speaking of cushion forts, I really liked this old MAD TV skit.
Truly gross: Strawberry Shortcake and her smelly friends.
I agree. Also gross -- my cousin had the Star Wars action figure that smelled like a skunk. He used to chase us around with it.
Until they cry.
Oh, the irony!
Now I have the Johnson's Baby Shampoo commercial theme song in my head.
Somebody I knew had a Heman set with a castle. The names are truly cringeworthy. He man and Shera. What were they thinking?
My sister really liked the My little pnoies. I kind of liked them too, though I'm embarassed to admit it now.
Johnson's Baby Shampoo smells different? Good. B/c that stuff smelled nasty.
I haven't noticed that Play-Doh smells any different, though.
We would make fun of them by mixing up the names: She-man and He-ra.
What about that Operation game? That was fun.
I have to say, though, that as an adult, Mouse Trap is incredibly sloooooow and boring.
I'm watching a little Buffy—okay, sure, I'm watching a lot of Buffy, wtfever—and I'm wondering whether the 'Xander-Buffy-Willow-Cordy axis isn't a more applicable commentary than memories of "token women." Not meaning to sound all Kim du Toit by any means, but I remember a great deal of weird gender pressure in wanting to excel in math, do my science homework, read the assigned novel, and as I recall those peers that did so with impunity were all girls.
166 - But it was the nastiness that made it Johnson's! That's what babies are supposed to smell like!
(And I wouldn't call it nasty. Just...odd.)
It was sharp and chemically. Gross.
Smasher, elaborate. I'm not following you.
Cripes, B, you really do hate America. Johnson's smell is a cherished memory. It's the smell of clean. And it was Castle Greyskull, He-Man, and She-Ra. And, of course, Kevin Garnett.
And Buffy is the least interesting character in Buffy.
I am Becks style, there is no following me. My experience growing up was that my academic peers were all girls—the G&T classes were probably 60/40 in favor of girls, and the best students in those classes were girls, and I belonged among the girl academic cohort. My guy friends were all skateboarders and practiced things like vomiting on command. I hate to endorse what I consider to be shoddy social science conclusions, but in my experience it was true: there was more pressusr to fail (or not succeed or show ambition) among guys than amongg irls.
163: No. Your cousin had Stinkor, a villain from the He-Man ouvre.
That's because of the war on boys, Smasher.
Actually, I think this is true: bookish pursuits are for pussies. This gets back to that American anxiety about masculinity thing, doesn't it?
174 - Ah! I do believe you are correct, sir.
When I was maybe 8, among other games, I played corporate executive, which largely consisted of sketching the organizational chart of my multinational conglomerate. The conglomerate was called Centax World. I don't remember any of the subsidiaries anymore, except for YOU Personal Hygiene Products. I also would sketch the architectural plan for my mansion. It had a bowling alley and a movie theater, which seemed to me the height of luxury.
I see the discussion has moved on to playdoh, but to answer the questions about my 22, b's comment about exploring misogyny just made me roll my eyes. Because I feel we do that all the time, and the most recent series of feminism discussions, around the Hirshman post, actually frightened me in their level of disdain for the average women. So for myself, I'm not sure how much is coming out of that ongoing exploration.
Maybe you can, I don't know, um, try to project imaginatively into the minds of people who aren't necessarily like you, rather than cataloguing all the ways you find them hateful? Or think about how a denigrated feminine trait can be beneficial? Chattiness, for instance, keeps women connected to one another and not isolated, so they can avoid the fate of all those people in that study who have no one to talk to? Or... any other number of other kinds of exercises.
Because I don't have my glasses on, I read Tia's mansion as having a howling alley. Which would be kind of cool.
However, despite playing corporate executive, I have never been the token women. I wasn't that femmey as a kid, but I played with girls, and as a grownup, I have to say that my close relationships with men are generally with gay men, with men I have been romantically involved with, or, in one case, with a man I really, really would have liked to have been involved with. I like teasing well enough when affection is simultaneously signalled, but I don't particularly like the jocular towel snapping routine (and IME many of the people in it don't like it as much as they pretend to), and I prefer relationships that are more straightforwardly supportive.
I'm still laughing at 'but Lincoln log forts explode when you bomb them with marbles!'
Legos were great, but I could never get them apart once stuck together. Lincoln Logs were great, as were blocks because you could make tall things and knock them down. I agree with Tim that most other wooden toys are pretty silly; we have children and suddenly we're in the wholesome 1800s where each kid has a set of hand-whittled toys tooled by machine and purchased for $24.99.
I loved Strawberry Shortcake and Rainbow Brite and My Little Pony and Herself the Elf (which I may be the only one to remember). Lite Brite ruled but like BG, I never had enough Lite Brite pieces.
173: I went to an an all-boys school until 11th grade, and there was no pressure not to succeed academically, and I had a lot of equally nerdy male friends. I think the pressure not to look like a nerd fades in the absense of chicks to impress. After the school went co-ed, I'm told that changed and that now women are disproportionately represented in the AP classes. I find that depressing. (Also they loosened the dress code, which (oddly) bothers me.)
And Buffy is the least interesting character in Buffy.
Man, is that ever true, especially as the show aged.
Maybe you can, I don't know, um, try to project imaginatively into the minds of people who aren't necessarily like you, rather than cataloguing all the ways you find them hateful? Or think about how a denigrated feminine trait can be beneficial?
This seems perfectly reasonable to me - certainly plenty of stereotypically feminine traits are useful and good in themselves (kindness, caretaking, sensitivity to the needs of others, this isn't meant to be an exhaustive list).
This, on the other hand:
the most recent series of feminism discussions, around the Hirshman post, actually frightened me in their level of disdain for the average women.
I'm not seeing. Given that I was one of Hirshman's most fervent defenders, I figure there's a reasonable chance that you're referring to things I've said. I do, strongly, disapprove of misogyny, and I'd appreciate your walking me through what you were talking about so I can figure out if I agree with you and need to change my behavior, if you have the time to be specific.
I'd be surprised if she were thinking of you just because you were one of Hirshman's defenders. As I remember that thread, there were a lot of ways of approaching it. Pro/Anti Hirshman isn't the locus, I think. It's what people said, often quite casually, about women as they are.
But! The notches limit your architectural options. You can only build tall, square structures.
You just didn't have enough lincoln logs. our set had logs of different lengths, so you could make alcoves and L-shapes entryways and so on. still, not as good as legos.
Hirshman's assumptions were themselves misogynist. It is pretty ridiculous to say that the way people are fulfilled in life is to work an 80 hour week in investment banking. Once you're starting at that position, all the women who make rather more sensible life decisions are cast as useless losers letting down the side.
Surely the point is that if you want to pursue power, or have some particular thing you want to achieve, you need to structure your life accordingly. But personal happiness is a separate matter, and to link it up solely to career is intellectually dishonest and portrays women as if they are simpletons, who are sabotaging their lives and the chances of their sisters for No Reason.
Even men might be happier if the American workplace were structured differently and people didn't work 14hr days to get ahead.
But I don't particularly want to rehash the Hirshman debate. What I said at AWB's site is that it occurred to me that people who adopt this sort of Jacobin extreme position see feminism in very abstract terms, removed from the lives of actual, likeable, not so insane or inscrutable women, perhaps because they have some history of not actually liking women all that much.
Just occurred to me as a possibility. I don't know that it's true.
Never piss off World Jewry, I always say.
A while back I e-mailed somebody this link and they were too chickenshit to post it. But I, I, will bravely post it.
Hirshman's assumptions were themselves misogynist. It is pretty ridiculous to say that the way people are fulfilled in life is to work an 80 hour week in investment banking.
She doesn't come anywhere near assuming or asserting that. Further, if she did, while it might be wrong, it wouldn't have anything to do with misogyny.
Hirshman's claim was that a fulfilling life includes professional achievement, and that a fulfilling life is basically the same for men and for women. And further, that to the extent that women systematically make choices that involve behaving according to stereotyped sex roles and consequently eschewing professional achievement, they are less fulfilled than they would otherwise be.
If you want to say that professional achievement isn't an important component of a fulfilling life for anyone, you disagree with Hirshman, and with me, (I doubt that you are taking this position) but that doesn't render her position misogynist. If you want to argue that professional achievement is or should be a significantly less important component of a fulfilling life for women than it is for men, you disagree with Hirshman and with me -- I can see how one might want to call Hirshman's position here misogynist, in that it denigrates the choices of women who have decided not to pursue professional achievement in favor of other aspects of their lives. I can also see how one might call the position that professional achievement is or should be a less important component of a fulfilling life for women than for men straightforwardly sexist. Given that both characterizations are terribly inflammatory, I don't think either is particularly useful.
186: I have to admit right now that I never read the Hirshman article all the way through, so I could be way off base. But isn't her whole article so obviously coming from the position of valuing power, and addressed to those who are in a position and of a disposition to pursue power, that to say she's trying to make that a universal value (and thus possibly misogynistic) ungenerous to her argument?
I admit that it's possible that part of what motivates her to make the argument is a bit of disdain for most women (in a certain class and culture), but then I'd hesitate to call that misogyny except in a generic sense. Surely it's possible to be somewhat disdainful of women (in a certain class and culture) without buying into negative patriarchal attitudes against those women. You can come up with your own negative attitudes. And anyway, her argument just as much saying that these women are disappointing themselves and neglecting their own happiness as she was that they were disappointing feminism. And I'm sure that argument has resonance for a number of high-ambition women.
I hope I'm not rehashing Hirshman so much as using her as a jumping-off point.
A while back I e-mailed somebody this link
Hey! I know who you are!
I found out recently that FNY believed his identity (another regular commenter) to be transparently obvious. To which I say, not so much.
I thought it was pretty easy to tell that is a pseudonym for Agoy-Fejan Ynnaf.
189 - I would argue both that (1) professional achievement is an important component of a fulfilling life for anyone however (2) professional achievement should be a significantly less important component of a fulfilling life for both women and men than it currently is today.
And 138 -- busty Playmobil figures??? We never had any busty Playmobil figures! I always thought they were unisex; apparently we only ever got the men.
193: No, that was one of my other sock puppets that's transparently obvious. This one's supposed to confuse people.
FNY, I know who you are. Because I read Unfogged. (What motivates you to show up as FNY when you do?)
189: I'd agree with both your 1 and your 2. My sense is that Hirshman's argument (or what I am guessing she would argue on this point; I haven't seen her quite make this argument) is that women who believe your 2 can't bring it about by dropping out -- they aren't putting pressure on the system to change, they're acting as a relief valve by allowing the men in their lives to have an acceptable family life while overvaluing professional achievement.
Further, that pursuing professional advancement in the same manner and to the same extent that men do will do more to bring about your 2 than dropping out will -- a marriage with children in which both partners are working 80 hours a week is intolerable for most people. In a society, then, where caretaking wives who valued family-life over professional achievement were unavailable, professional men and the organizations that employ them would be forced to back off from the exorbitant claims on their employees time and attention.
This argument may be wrong, but it's not misogynist to make it.
199: "Unavailable" should be "not a role that women are disproportionately willing to take on due to gendered social pressures".
199's second paragraph adds a lot of steps and inferences to what Hirshman wrote, and it's not at all obvious to me that it is what she intends. It's just as probable she believes in a super-elite where both partners work 80 hour weeks.
199: It should be noted that there's quite a phenomenon of video game programmers (usually young single guys) being hired by certaing gaming firms and worked 80 hours a week until they burn out. And so you get stories of sleeping at the office, of not even owning an apartment, and jokes about ironing boards and hammocks in cubicles. So I don't think that kind of work culture is limited to men with wives at home.
I don't see why professional achievement is a *necessary* part of *anyone's* fulfiling life. And I can see why women who don't work for money found it incredibly insulting and misogynistic. I haven't worked for a salary for 10 years now, and I feel pretty fulfilled, thanks. And more to the point, have no wish to have to go out to work. And doesn't it just add to the pressure on men too? Not all men want to work for 40 years either.
That sort of attitude does sometimes make me wary of working mothers - I'm not sure whether it ever really happens, but I m conscious of not wanting to be looked down upon because I don't work, I just stay at home with my children. In fact, I met up with an old school friend last week, who is moving to my town. He came round with his wife and children - his wife has a high-powered marketing executive job, and I was nervous that she was going to be some kind of soulless bitch who would think I was wasting my life. As it turned out, she's lovely - phew.
I was a tomboy for years, and went from one extreme (all girls school from 7-16) to the other, and have been the Token Woman - accidentally, and not proud of it. Some of the TW bit was really good for me, some wasn't. My best friends was always been female - more femme than myself - but the larger group was mainly male. As I've got older, I've acquired more and more female friends, to the extent that I would now say I mostly preferred women's company to men's. But I think that just means that I've met a lot more women I like, not that my tastes have changed. I still wouldn't like the girly girls I didn't like at college.
I've got 3 daughters, and they're all far more girly in appearance than I was at their ages. But I think a large part of that is, as mentioned above, the increasing dichotomy in girl and boy stuff, and the pushing of femmey accessories onto younger and younger girls. It's so hard to buy my girls clothes which don't cost a fortune and which aren't outrageously gendered. (And I do try, because I've got a son to pass things down to!) They don't seem that much different to me in attitude though.
So I don't think that kind of work culture is limited to men with wives at home.
Most men (most people generally) at some point in their lives have children. At that point, they either stop working the 80 hour weeks, or they have wives taking a disproportionate share of the parenting load.
A work culture where childless people in their 20's were expected to work ridiculous hours, and others weren't, would be workable, I guess, but it's not the culture we've got.
I liked the large cardboard bricks. One could build a small house and destroy it in under twenty minutes.
204: I don't know, sounds a bit like a law firm, where the people in their twenties work ridiculous hours, and the other people work slightly less ridiculous hours.
LB -- we could also, with similar justification, have a culture where the elite were encouraged not to have children or to postpone childbearing, and the underclass was expected to bear and rear the next generation.
201: Hirshman doesn't explicitly make the argument in my 199, but she does, in her controversial 'marrying down' bit of the argument, say this:
If you both are going through the elite-job hazing rituals simultaneously while having children, someone is going to have to give. Even the most devoted lawyers with the hardest-working nannies are going to have weeks when no one can get home other than to sleep. The odds are that when this happens, the woman is going to give up her ambitions and professional potential.
recognizing that the dual 80-hour-a-week-career marriage is unworkable. And she suggests solving the unworkability by making the man in the couple as much of the safety valve as the woman is.
206: No they don't. Partners, in the places I've worked, bill as many or more hours as associates.
Am I the only one who finds Hirschman to be a big weirdo?
210: No. Though, as I said before, I find her arguments pretty compelling.
What motivates you to show up as FNY when you do?
Whimsy or, as in this case, not wanting to have my real name anywhere near comment 188.
I don't see why professional achievement is a *necessary* part of *anyone's* fulfiling life. And I can see why women who don't work for money found it incredibly insulting and misogynistic. I haven't worked for a salary for 10 years now, and I feel pretty fulfilled, thanks. And more to the point, have no wish to have to go out to work. And doesn't it just add to the pressure on men too? Not all men want to work for 40 years either.
Does it have to be a part of everyone's fulfilling life? No. But there's something wrong with a system where it's recognized as an important part of a fulfilling life for men, and a much less important part for women. And the gendered tendency of women to drop out of the paid workforce puts more, rather than less, pressure on the men in their families to achieve -- you've dropped out of paying work, and as a consequence your husband's freedom to drop out or cut back is vastly restricted. (Less so in England, where there's a more reasonable safety net then in the US, but still vastly restricted.)
To the extent that your decision to drop out was influenced by your gender, I think that's a bad reason to abandon professional achievement, and I don't believe that thinking that makes me a misogynist. That doesn't mean that I hold you, personally, in contempt, or think ill of you -- I just don't like the cultural framework in which I am guessing you've made your life decisions, and to the extent that what you do with your life is any of my business (an extremely limited, bordering on non-existent extent), I wish that you had examined and resisted that cultural framework to a greater extent.
I don't find it all that likely that a greater share of women ibankers would put that much pressure on the childrearing arrangements of elite men, and I'm not sure that was Hirshman's argument, either. All the men have to do is find someone in a slightly less elite class for whom the marriage would be greater financial security than what working could provide them (maybe that security is illusory, or maybe not, depending on how the woman managed to arrange things before/within the marriage). I don't think this would be hard for them to find.
210: No, half the blogophere thinks she's a meanie weirdo woman-hater. I happen to disagree with them. (I thought that she was deliberately inflammatory, but that doesn't make her a weirdo -- heavens, an academic wrote an inflammatory polemic! Someone get my smelling salts.)
"thought that she was deliberately inflammatory, but that doesn't make her a weirdo"
Yes, it does.
211: "No" should have been "yes." She's a freak.
One thing I've noticed about my Generation Awesome friends and co-workers is that, for most couples I know, the woman is the primary breadwinner. If I look around at the men on my team, I think almost all of their wives make more than they do. They're no slouches (engineers, etc.) but their wives are all lawyers and doctors and I-bankers. It's the men in my office who are always cutting out to take their kid to doctor's appointments, etc.
we've worked different places, LB. but you have a lot more experience in the profession, and either way, everyone worked pretty hard where I was.
Legos were great, but I could never get them apart once stuck together.
Yes! This.
Lincoln Logs were great. I wanted to be Abe Lincoln! It was so easy to take them apart and build something new. You could build a wide variety of structures, if you just used the logs of varying lengths.
Did anyone else have the gigantic multivolume Childcraft book series? They were like encyclopedias for kids. I read like a squillion of them. "The How and Why Library", I think it was called. Childcraft taught me everything.
I played with so much He-Man, and yet, there was always someone who had more He-Man products than I. I didn't really feel like I had the power. Perhaps this is what drew me to Howard Dean. Interestingly, I knew a guy on the Dean campaign who looked a lot like Skeletor.
All the men have to do is find someone in a slightly less elite class for whom the marriage would be greater financial security than what working could provide them (maybe that security is illusory, or maybe not, depending on how the woman managed to arrange things before/within the marriage). I don't think this would be hard for them to find.
It's a question of cultural pressures. Most people in the US are formally committed to the equality of the sexes on some level. Now, men in the professional elite can marry women who are their professional equals (graduates of the same schools, etc.) and still be fairly likely to get the caretaking benefits of marrying a non-professional. If that possibility is taken away from them, we get to see whether they're committed to the romantic ideal of marriages between equals, or if marriage is, as you suggest, a more complex way of hiring a housekeeper. I have to say I have a certain amount of faith in romance on this one.
218: Maybe Hirshman's behind the curve, and people are doing the sorts of things she advises. Excellent, if true.
215: Maybe this is the "deliberately inflammatory" part, but I remember part of the controversy over Hirshman being her denigration of pink-collar areas like social work in favor of doing long hours, getting high pay, working for the Man. And being quite dismissive of women who did not take her favored path. Which I think was part of the idea behind the charge of hostility to actually existing women.
I also find the 'smelling salts' line unfortunate here, when we're discussing whether this position involves contempt for a lot of femmier women.
I wisely skipped all the Hirshman discussion, but now I have to ask whether anyone even bothered to argue that women, generally speaking, are and always will be better natural (yeah, natural) child-rearers? If not, you gotta admit that's pretty funny.
romantic ideal of marriages between equals
As long as we're talking about things that bother us, I've never been happy with language that presumes that two people from a different class, or with different professional credentials, are not equals.
If you were talking about the division of labor in the relationship, it's already evident that these hypothetical men are not committed to any particular symmetry, since their wives are leaving the workforce,.
If someone willing to have that sort of arrangement isn't willing to marry someone slightly lower on the socioeconomic ladder than they are, the only ideal being upheld is class isolation. But if that winds up meaning that women have fewer barriers to the professional class, I guess it did some good.
220: Legoes now come with a tool, a thin lever, that helps children pry the bricks apart. I find this almost unsportsmanlike.
215: There's barely any housewives in Sweden, since well before I was born. The whole concept is kinda weird to me. So it's not like some science fiction scenario you're discussing.
The first line should be italicized, since I'm quoting LB.
Housewife s/b stay at home mom, I guess. Hmm.
226: Legoes now come with a tool, a thin lever, that helps children pry the bricks apart. I find this almost unsportsmanlike.
Children today are too soft. It's a good thing there's going to be plenty of war around to toughen them up a bit.
224: I think I argued that their vaginas send out child-calming rays, which is pretty much the same argument.
Maybe this is the "deliberately inflammatory" part, but I remember part of the controversy over Hirshman being her denigration of pink-collar areas like social work in favor of doing long hours, getting high pay, working for the Man.
I can see how her tone would lead you to that conclusion, but I don't think that's a necessary part of her argument. She characterizes the work she values for women as "good work in interesting jobs where they may occasionally wield real social power," and talks about money as a marker of where power lies:
Money is the marker of success in a market economy; it usually accompanies power, and it enables the bearer to wield power, including within the family.
I don't believe that she's making the claim that money is the only thing that matters, but rather that making decisions in the direction of more money (a) is a good rule of thumb for figuring out if you're taking your profession seriously, and doing good work in it, and (b) will often enable you to continue to take your profession seriously. The problem with idealism and social services isn't so much that they're low-paying, but that they're markers of being a dilettante -- if you want to pursue an idealistic career seriously and professionally, I don't believe Hirshman would disapprove of that.
227: Well, then she's addressing an issue that you're personally unfamiliar with. Calling her a weirdo for that seems out of place.
213: My husband? Did I mention a husband? That amused me. Though in fact the man does exist. He likes going to work though. I've been trying to persuade him recently to take compressed hours (here, if your youngest child is under 6, you have the right to do 4 longer days rather than 5), but I'm not getting anywhere! He has a vague plan to work less in 'the future'.
Really, I try to live my life doing what *I* want to do. I got a decent degree from a good university, I worked for a few years. I've thought loads since I was about 22 about what I want to do with my lfe, and its implications, and I have never managed to get my head round the idea that to be a 'good feminist' (or whatever) I should go to work every day rather than doing what I want to.
Luckily, my vagina does indeed send out child-calming rays, so that makes for a happy home life.
The idea of making decisions in the direction of more money repels me. If you're taking your profession seriously, shouldn't there be more of a motivation than money?
my vagina does indeed send out child-calming rays
Do they interfere with your wireless phone reception?
225: Hey, a possible model for successful marriage and childrearing would be one partner in a high-pressured, elite job, and one partner not working or in a much less pressured job. If that were a non-gendered pattern (in which both male and female professionals tended to marry those who wanted a less demanding professional life) I'd be happier than I am with the current highly gendered norm.
Not as happy as I'd be if professional life were less demanding for everyone, but happier than I am now.
My husband? Did I mention a husband?
Arguably you did in 203 -- not having worked for money in 10 years and simultaneously having a child implies the existence of some non-work source of income; so either you were born wealthy or have a husband or wife earning money, no?
My husband? Did I mention a husband? That amused me. Though in fact the man does exist.
You don't work. You do eat. Assuming that someone pays the bills doesn't seem out of line.
If you're taking your profession seriously, shouldn't there be more of a motivation than money?
Certainly (once we get past the annoying realities of buying food, and clothing, and paying rent or a mortgage). But whether you're making money is a fair rule-of-thumb way of determining whether you're taking your profession seriously or being a dilettante. I fully support the right of women to be selfishly committed avant-garde artists, supported by the self-abasing men who love them over the long decades until their genius is recognized -- they're taking their professional lives seriously, whether or not they're making money. But that sort of thing doesn't apply to most of us.
227/229: I think we should look at how this happened; that might help us evalute whether Hirshman's prescriptions are a plausible way to eliminate gender barriers.
I'm really skeptical of the idea that elite women can force top jobs to have more reasonable hours by working absurd hours themselves (as per 208). If making partner takes working 80 hours a week, and if a man with an elite wife can't work 80 hours a week, my guess is that the people who make partner will be men who don't have elite wives (as per 214); and people who don't have children. Romance (221) may keep many men married to elite wives, but those men won't make partner.
"Make partner" is here shorthand for obtaining those ridiculous jobs, I have no insight into law firm dynamics. But I just have trouble imagining someone saying "Joe is always at the office late at night, and his wife takes care of the kids. Bob has to switch off evenings with his wife. Let's promote Bob, because we must understand his plight!" Men might get more of a hearing than women about childcare issues, but I'd guess that in the end the men who work the most hours will still be considered the best team players.
The point being that reforming these jobs can't be done entirely by working within the system. We should promote the "nobody should work 80 hours" ethos as well as encouraging women to strive for high-powered jobs. In fact, the more that ethos obtains, the easier it'll be to attain gender equity in the workplace, I bet. (Though I'd hope not because high-powered women would still be assuming a disproportionate childcare burden.)
Clown's 237 made the same point I meant to in the beginning of 238 much less rudely -- I didn't mean to be offensive, I'm just jotting down responses quickly.
237 and 238: I'm British - I could be a lone parent living here on benefits for my entire life. But it was the husband thing that amused me most really - if I were talking to someone I didn't know, I'd always say partner. I could be living with anyone, married or not.
Selfishly-committed, self-abasing? Doesn't sound like full support!
235: Only when it's set on vibrate.
240: Hey - s'ok - I was trying to get across my mild amusement without using a damn smiley, and clearly failed.
241: Sorry, I'm American and we've got some cultural differences going. While long-term cohabitation combined with childrearing isn't unheard of among the educated middle-class, it's uncommon enough that guessing that a long-term couple with kids is married is pretty safe. I understand the odds are different in England.
Didn't mean to cause offence.
242: Okay, I'll stop apologizing now.
Try turning your vagina to the "amusement ray" setting.
While long-term cohabitation combined with childrearing isn't unheard of among the educated middle-class, it's uncommon enough that guessing that a long-term couple with kids is married is pretty safe.
Ah, I see. I don't know what the stats are here, but I know plenty of couples who aren't married, gay and straight.
239: The thing is (and I'm making wild-ass-guesses about how stuff would work out. I could be entirely wrong) that (a) there's no necessary connection between the quality of your work and your willingness to work stupid hours but (b) when willingness to work stupid hours is the (masculine) norm, there's no risk of losing high-quality work by screening out those who won't work the hours. When Bob, who wants evenings off, is more common than Phil, who doesn't have kids and will work till he drops in harness, firms will be stuck choosing between their best lawyers and their lawyers who work the longest hours, who won't necessarily be the same people.
239: No, you one should use government programs and legislation. Subsidized daycare and parental leave, and laws against firing parents on leave. That's the only way to make much progress in LB's lifetime. A non-starter in the short term, but potentially a real political winner in the long term. Yglesias has discussed this a fair amount.
245: will that help with the clown-fucking too?
239: No, you one should use government programs and legislation. Subsidized daycare and parental leave, and laws against firing parents on leave. That's the only way to make much progress in LB's lifetime. A non-starter in the short term, but potentially a real political winner in the long term. Yglesias has discussed this a fair amount.
239: No, you one should use government programs and legislation. Subsidized daycare and parental leave, and laws against firing parents on leave. That's the only way to make much progress in LB's lifetime. A non-starter in the short term, but potentially a real political winner in the long term. Yglesias has discussed this a fair amount.
248, 250, 251: Which I'm also all for.
245: will that help with the clown-fucking too?
So, I haven't read all the comments because I'm too scared to have a window open for that long, and I don't want to get busted reading blogs at the London office, but I do want to put my two cents in. Mostly I wanted to respond to what someone said upthread that women get their level of femminess from their mothers; I think this is true in a lot of ways (because three anecdotes make a rule, apparently), as me, my sister, and a friend of mine, all with dead mothers, are some of the most non-femmy straight chicks I know. And I am using "femmy" not just to mean appearance ('cause really, I'm relatively femme; I do wear makeup and sometimes jewelry, although I abhor heels), but the sort of stereotypical feminine behaviors and attitudes I see in a lot of other women. A lot of times I see other women behaving in ways that perplex me, but do not seem to perplex others, and I think these are learned behaviors.
I hate that I have actively tried, in my brief adulthood, to be "not like those other girls." In some instances, this ended up being pretty damaging. For example, the term "high-maintenance", which is closely associated with being "girly" (also, it's total bullshit and misogynist), is something I never wanted to be, and actively tried to not be, particularly emotionally, which ended up in me not getting a lot of my emotional needs met. I'm still working on that now; it's difficult not to be apologetic about every time I'm hurt or offended by something. I've generally forcibly turned down my emotional reactions to things, which I think is pretty unhealthy.
WTF?
LB, I'm a little surprised that you don't think Hirschman is a bit of a freak. I confess I've only read a little of her stuff, but she appears to feel a great deal of anger and disdain towards these SAHMs, for example.
248 is what I'm most in favor of. And 250. And 251. And 253. Comity!
247 may be right, but this is a question of percentages. The firms are probably screening out some of their best lawyers already; for instance, the women. If only a few women go the Hirshman out, that risk won't be achieved much. Talking out of my ass, I'm going to guess that even if half of the male associates wind up on the Bob track, that won't be enough to change the ingrained corporate culture; you'll get the partners, who will still be Phils, making a lot of jokes about how whipped Bob is.
The best hope for changing the culture, I'd guess, is some kind of Swedish-style government intervention. Exhortation of women to take their professions seriously could help but it can't be the main mover.
Basically, the Hirshman argument from 208 seems like a heightening the contradictions thing.
It's not reasonable to scold people for choosing what's best for their family, or themselves, or to feel morally superior because you chose a different lifestyle.
256: David, I don't think we're going to have a productive discussion of whether you can tell that Hirshman's a freak by reading a little of her stuff and deciding that she feels inappropriate anger and disdain.
I like talking about whether writers are right or wrong, interesting and illuminating or dull. I find whether they are good or bad people, or emotionally unbalanced in some unfortunate way, less interesting. I am particularly reluctant to discuss whether a woman making an explicitly feminist argument has done so in an unfortunately aggressive, or hostile, or freakish manner.
This isn't to say that you aren't free to think whatever you like of her -- she's not my sister or my mother, and I have no reason to take disapproval of her personally. But I don't find your personal opinion of her, or her tone rather than her arguments, interesting, and I don't plan to engage you on it.
(This is a little stiff, but I didn't seem to be successfully making my point by being less explicit. No hard feelings, and maybe someone else wants to talk about what a freak Hirshman is.)
I have nothing to say about freakishness. But Hirshman came up in this thread (178) because of the question of whether she projects disdain for the average woman.
And tone is important here, especially because I don't think her arguments support her conclusion. That is, I think they support "work for Sweden-style reforms" rather than "try to get an 80 hour a week job." So the seeming hostility to social workers is relevant to the misogyny question, even if (as per 232) it isn't essential to her argument.
There's no point in restarting the Hirschman discussion, since clearly no positions on her views have changed, but I find it amusing that no one's brought up the idea that by doing childcare one makes oneself a member of an untouchable caste, wallowing in filth. No disdain there.
260: I don't think Hirshman disdains the average woman. She doesn't even think about the average woman. Without going back and rereading her essays and blog entries, my memories were of her always addressing the female elite. Those who went to top schools and even to top firms, but then chose to drop out and become a full-time mother instead of becoming captains of industry, with high paychecks, many minions, the whole lot.
I suppose that partially due to my elitist tendencies, I agree with her focus. At the lower levels of employment (unless we're talking minimum-wage low, necessitating two or more jobs), people don't actually work all that much. It's very possible to be a two-income family if both parents are in low-level 40 hour a week white-collar or blue-collar or service jobs. The top opportunities in our society, the most elite jobs, are the ones requiring ridiculous hours. And they're the only jobs requiring more hours than they did 20 years ago. They are the jobs incompatible with family life, and they are the people with the most influence and wealth. If you want to change society, you want to change those corporate and political elites first.
"I am particularly reluctant to discuss whether a woman making an explicitly feminist argument has done so in an unfortunately aggressive, or hostile, or freakish manner."
An unfortunately misogynist manner?
We are talking about whether she's right or wrong.
Most US pundits seems like pretty weird people to me, and not in a benign manner. Comparatively more female exceptions than male, I think.
Most people seem to have a hard time buying that Hirschman and you really have the same opinions. Since you spent those old threads defending her as much as your own views, you got a lot more grief than you would have.
260: There's a real distinction between a misogynistic argument, and a misogynistic tone. I think there's a reasonable discussion to be had of whether her arguments are misogynistic. I think it's impractical to diagnose her personal failings from a very limited sample of her writing, and I think there's a real risk of falling into the double standard of judging a woman disproportionately on the basis of personal flaws (meanness, rudeness, etc.)
We are talking about whether she's right or wrong.
You were talking about whether she's a freak and whether she's angry and disdainful. It is possible for an angry, disdainful freak to be right. I'm interested in whether she's right or wrong -- whether she's an angry, disdainful freak doesn't interest me.
That sounds like you're saying a misogynist tone would be unimportant. I disagree.
Isn't the issue whether tone is indicative of content? There are a number of interpretations of what Hirshman wrote that are credible, and tone would be one way of choosing between them. I don't know that I'd call any of it mysogynistic--it seems strange to me to call someone who has a good faith devotion to bettering the lives of women a mysogynist. She might have imbibed and believed some attitudes that are mysogynistic, but I don't think that's self-evidently clear.
At base, the issue is whether you can say, "Women should X rather than Y," without being a mysogynist. I'm not sure content alone, particularly (as LB notes) a limited review of content, is going to answer that. Maybe it would be clear if her motivating premises were well-understood to have been widely rejected, but that's clearly not true.
That said, given the response, she might work on her presentation skills.
That's an interesting issue in itself. I don't think you can evaluate someon's arguments without evaluating their personality. I mean, I don't think you should, or that you can even if you try.
The female, feminist angle makes it's more touchy, but I think I'm criticising her from a feminist standpoint. I am a feminist.
But in a particular people like Friedman, Cohen, Broder, Weisberg, Saletan, Rall, etc, etc... I don't think you can evaluate them properly without some amateur psychology.
Adding to 267: In particular, I connect the idea that The Argument Is All to the problem, if it is one, of seeing feminism in abstract terms removed from the lives of actual women, as per ac's 186. And that excessive abstraction can detract from one's arguments and positions. (It might be connected to what Katha Pollitt sees as myopia about social solutions like public day-care.)
I certainly don't want to apply any double standard, but I honestly don't think I'm doing that with Hirshman's social work passages.
On preview, agreed with 268 except for the last sentence, but not really with 269.
267: I'm saying that you can't reliably diagnose a misogynist attitude from a small sample of writing to the extent that it does not make explicitly misogynistic claims. If everything she's ever written drips with disdain for women, she's a misogynist, certainly.
The essay we're all working from (I read the book-length version, but I wouldn't advise anyone else to bother -- it doesn't add much. Quotes Bitch approvingly, though) denigrates and devalues the domestic sphere as a route to personal fulfillment. That's not misogyny unless you think of the domestic sphere as necessarily feminine which Hirshman explicitly argues that it shouldn't be. To get from a tone that disdains domesticity (absolutely in the essay) to an accusation of misogyny, you have to believe that she really does, despite her denials, think that domesticity=femininity.
Now, she might -- it's possible. Maybe she does. But you need a track record of her saying mean things about women and creating deniability for herself by denying that they're really about women to call her tone misogynist. If we're working from this essay alone, I don't think it's a productive discussion to have.
I don't think you can evaluate someon's arguments without evaluating their personality. I mean, I don't think you should, or that you can even if you try.
I couldn't disagree with this more if I tried with both hands. I can see using a consistent tone or knowledge of a writer's individual emotional leanings as a clue for where to look for logical flaws in their writing, but an argument stands up or it doesn't regardless of who says it and what kind of personality they have.
In the case of Hirschman, maybe I should have shut up before I read more of her stuff. But it's only a comments thread.
If public intellectual John Smith becomes influential, his impulses, attitudes, prejudices may influence as much as his specfic positions. Wingnuts frequently shift positions, but never impulses.
Yeah, on misogyny I agree with LB here. I don't think Hirschman's arguments are misogynist. I think for her the married-down artist husband doing housework and raising the kids is just as low (in power, and in terms of full human fluorishing) as the stay at home mom.
maybe I should have shut up before I read more of her stuff.
I'm not saying shut up about what she wrote, I'm saying don't diagnose her emotional pathologies on the basis of a couple of thousand words. (I'm not even saying don't do it, just that I find it pointless and uninteresting.)
Shorter "married-down artist husband doing housework and raising the kids": stay at home dad.
Put me in the "tone is part of content" camp. I've always defended the piece myself, thought it was meant to be challenging and confrontational, and am not surprised at the hostile reaction it has inspired from some people I like and respect.
Hirschman seems to concentrate on, not promoting policies, but promote certain attitudes to bring about social change (and cultural attitudes are pretty imortant.) Hirschman's attitudes are then clearly pertinent.
278: How so? She is advocating that people generally adopt a certain set of attitudes with the goal of attaining a more just world. What she advocates will work, or it won't, and the resulting world will be more just, or it won't. This is true whether she's the reincarnation of Strawberry Shortcake or a vicious misogynist who's intentionally trying to keep the women that she despises in their place -- her own attitudes may tip you off to figuring out if and why she's wrong, but they don't, in themselves, matter.
270: Oh, you agree with the last sentence, motherfucker. You'll see that in the fullness of time. Or I'll get teo to freeze your bank account.
272: but an argument stands up or it doesn't regardless of who says it and what kind of personality they have.
This, I think, is untrue. There is always too much wiggle room in most arguments; I keep waiting for the so-called-philosophers here to fucking definitively tell me if this is simply a function of language that we cannot avoid. I'm not sure how many statements by wingnuts on Padilla I would disagree with. I do disagree on application, which is to say that I mean something different than they mean when each of us says the same statement. Absent an ennumeration of all possible situations in which the statement will be applied, I think assumptions about character become really important.
"I'm saying don't diagnose her emotional pathologies"
Let's not, but let's discuss her underlying attitudes and values.
I think I have to bow out of this discussion and earn my bread.
283 to 281, but of course it applies as well to 282.
I'm don't think she's a nutter, to be clear. She's like a angrier Jonathan Chait, or something.
I'm saying, I guess, look at the underlying attitudes and prejudices of a pundit, and not necessarily i a good faith way.
Ogged's 224 is, I fear, at the crux here. And it factors into this comment from LB:
Does it [paid work outside the home] have to be a part of everyone's fulfilling life? No. But there's something wrong with a system where it's recognized as an important part of a fulfilling life for men, and a much less important part for women.
This is what needs to be proved not stipulated. It seems entirely possible that men and women, on average, differ on the value they place on certain components of a fulfilling life (and perhaps even the components themselves). What if as a matter of fact one gender on average puts a value of X on a component of a fulfilling life that the other gender values at X/2? This seems like a) a possible state of affairs, b) one that would have important social and political consequence, and c) not at all hostile to a feminist program.
If we stipulate that women and men, on average, prioritize values differently, we can then ask why this is, is it malleable, etc. If it's easy to socialize men and women to have similar priorities, maybe that's valuable (and maybe this is the project Hirschman is really engaged in). But the first thing a person thinks about her priorities is "how do I *satisfy* them," not "how do I change them to better fit a model of social justice." That first response may not always be the right one, of course, but I think it does explain the negative response to Hirschman.
OK, back to my British reality show...
There's barely any housewives in Sweden, since well before I was born.
But doesn't the government mandate and financially support something like 3 years of maternity leave?
This is what needs to be proved not stipulated.
This is another case where what we're really wondering about is what the default position should be. In this case, I'm much more comfortable with LB's default position.
287 -- is that a euphemism?
I don't exactly know what LB's default position is. But Hirschman's default position is that many individual women who choose to drop out of the work force are making a mistake about how to have a fulfilling life. If the evidence for this is that men aren't making the same choices, that's a really, really bad argument.
It is mistake to see the currrent status of women in the workplace as the static consequence of unchangable male and female preferences. For one thing, women's access to elite jobs and colleges is really quite new. Before that time, women who tried to do elite jobs were generally ridiculed as unfeminine.
There are indications that there are more changes to come. Colleges are graduating women to men in a 60/40 ratio. A couple decades of this will inevitably change the gender characterization of the workplace.
292: It is mistake to see the currrent status of women in the workplace as the static consequence of unchangable male and female preferences.
Yes, I agree with that. But it may also be a mistake to view the current preferences of men and women as nothing but socially constructred and (relatively) malleable. Hey, this may all be wrong, of course, but it seems at least plausible that that men and women do, on average, prefer different things. I see Hirschman's argument either a) denyies that this can be true, or b) implying, if it is true, that that women are more likely to have a defective view of what the good life (for them) comprises. That seems like a problem.
a) denyies that this can be true
Did you mean Denny's?
The anti-Hirshman argument makes me angry. Her point is that *to pursue the feminist goals of empowering women and enabling their independence* women need to have power, and that the route to this is through work and money. Everything else follows from that, including her disdain for pink collar jobs: the fact is that women *do* default into those jobs because they allow "more balance" or whatever--i.e., that they rationalize away their lack of power by promising happiness. And the basic presumption--that there's some innate conflict between power and happiness--is one that's been used since time immemorial to keep women from challenging the status quo.
None of that is misogynist. Now, I can see how people would find her *tone* potentially misogynist; yes, in the things she's written that I've read, her language scoots back and forth between women as a class and women as individuals. And maybe there is misogyny there; or maybe it's just frustration and anger with women who continue to allow themselves to be held back (or to hold themselves back) with rationalizations about how their choices are just as feminist as anyone else's. That seems to me (and I suspect Hirshman) as intellectually dishonest. If you're making a compromise (for entirely understandable reasons), more power to you, but don't pretend that you're not compromising.
Colleges are graduating women to men in a 60/40 ratio. A couple decades of this will inevitably change the gender characterization of the workplace.
You'd think; but what seems to happen is that women downscale their ambitions and men don't, and thus the workplace changes far less slowly than you'd think based simply on the numbers.
it may also be a mistake to view the current preferences of men and women as nothing but socially constructred and (relatively) malleable. Hey, this may all be wrong, of course, but it seems at least plausible that that men and women do, on average, prefer different things.
You're setting up a totally false dichotomy. Preferences are surely socially constructed, inasmuch as our choices between "paid work" and "staying home to take care of kids" are choices that are social constructs (and not that old, either).
My problem with Hirshman is not that I dislike her tone. It's with the content, which seems to me to be misguided. The fact that I also find her tone distasteful does not mean that I must only dislike her content because I'm too delicate to deal with a nasty tone and that I would gladly accept her argument had she presented them with flowers and smiles. I also believe her tone informs her argument, such as it is, when she says things like 'low caste' referring to moms dealing with baby shit.
If I sound a bit miffed about this, it's that the last thread turned into 'You disagree with her because she's shrill.'
The reasons I think she's wrong, as I've said before:
1) The only acceptable careers seem to be those that bring in a lot of money. She cites banking and law. Okay, fair enough, she's talking to the Westchester pre-school teacher set who majors in art history. But...
2) Because of her focus on lucrative careers, she ignores the hard sciences (themselves quite lucrative if your standards aren't Manhattan) and engineering. So we'll have a lot of women making money moving money around but fewer women doctors and engineers.
3) This is the big one. Yes, it is easier to rationalize dropping out if you don't make much money. It's also easier to rationalize dropping out if your career seriously compromises your ability to have a family and you want to have a family. 'Cause you're the only one that can carry the pregnancy. Jobs with lots of travel? Jobs with hazardous chemicals?
It's hard to make up time in law and i-banking. It's comparatively easier in the humanities and the academy; lower pay, but more flexible schedules. It's also easier to return to some careers than others. All of the influence what women can do and will do. All of this Hirshman ignores.
You'd think; but what seems to happen is that women downscale their ambitions and men don't, and thus the workplace changes far less slowly than you'd think based simply on the numbers.
Not to mention the choices of majors among women. While women are taking over medical school and dental school, they're still sticking mostly to general practitioner status while men fill the surgeon and specialist positions. Engineering, technology and business are all still male-dominated at school and in the workplace. There are very definitely still "female subjects" and "male subjects" that perpetuate the higher earnings and power for men.
>>Colleges are graduating women to men in a 60/40 ratio. A couple decades of this will inevitably change the gender characterization of the workplace.
>You'd think; but what seems to happen is that women downscale their ambitions and men don't, and thus the workplace changes far less slowly than you'd think based simply on the numbers.
You could be right. I think the results of this are going to be somewhat unpredictable.
I don't see what the false dichotomy is. No doubt our choices and preferences are influenced by our environment. The question is how much they can be changed, and what are the costs/benefits of instituting those changes. If a woman chooses an occupation other than the one she would most enjoy, that's a cost. I assume you acknowledge that. There may also be enormous benefits to her taking that job (role modeling, shaping a more egalitarian culture, making it easier for the next woman, etc.). Why is it crazy for an individual woman to ask how these costs and benefits balance, or to scrutinize how great these benefits (which perhaps will not accrue to her in the slightest) actually are? Why this counts as "rationalizing" or "holding oneself back" I don't know.
Everything else follows from that, including her disdain for pink collar jobs: the fact is that women *do* default into those jobs because they allow "more balance" or whatever--i.e., that they rationalize away their lack of power by promising happiness. And the basic presumption--that there's some innate conflict between power and happiness--is one that's been used since time immemorial to keep women from challenging the status quo.
Urg. Maybe there is no innate conflict between power and happiness, but there very well may be an innate conflict between happiness and the kind of power LH is talking about given how it is achieved in our society currently (through 80 hour work weeks) for at least some portion of the population. I am positive that ibanking or corporate lawyering would innately conflict with happiness for me. This is the condescension, right there, the attitude that this is the one true path to feminism.
And I don't know what the word is for valorizing the pursuit of power and money and disparaging pink collar work and domesticity. But it's...something, if it's not misogyny. (Warning women that pink collar work and domesticity may not adequately provide for them is accurate and useful. Expressing contempt for those pursuits, not as much.)
There is some kind of bullshit at the core of telling women that being a SAHM is not adequate for human fluorishing, but that they should be trying to follow the money as much as possible, which in America generally means backbreaking workweeks and little time for leisure or family. I really want to echo the people on this thread who say that European style safety nets would be a much better way to alter the structure of society than an injunction to throw ourselves into the breach of making as much money as we can.
If I sound a bit miffed about this, it's that the last thread turned into 'You disagree with her because she's shrill.'
To the extent this happened, I was the one doing it, and I shouldn't have. I was trying to divert the conversation away from discussion of Hirshman, and back onto her arguments -- I didn't intend to shut down disagreement with accusations of sexism.
Substantively, in your points 1 and 2, I think you're expecting a manifesto to be an encyclopedia. She doesn't give an exhaustive list of careers she approves as sufficiently serious for women -- if she did, I'd be surprised if engineering, medicine, and the hard sciences were off the list because they were low-paying. When she makes a general statement about the kind of work she values for women, it's "good work in interesting jobs where they may occasionally wield real social power." The 'follow the money' argument is about retaining the capacity to make your own professional choices without being constrained by your family's needs, and about not kidding yourself about whether you are taking your work seriously -- work that someone won't pay you decently for is more likely to be (not inevitably, but more likely to be) dilettante work.
It is possible that I'm misreading Hirshman, and she really is saying that it's a feminist imperative to seek out money for its own sake -- that all women should be I-bankers. And if that is what she means, I disagree with her. But it doesn't seem to me to be the most likely interpretation of what she says.
And 297.3:
This one just seems silly. Pregnancy is 18-27 months out of most women's lives, and you can travel fine for most of it. Hazardous chemicals, maybe, but how many professional jobs involve working with hazardous chemicals in a manner incompatible with pregnancy? I can't think of much beyond working in a bio/chem lab, and I can't believe that scheduling around a couple of pregnancies would make a research career unworkable.
work that someone won't pay you decently for is more likely to be (not inevitably, but more likely to be) dilettante work.
And that means it's less likely to lead to human flourishing? Is that what you take Hirschman's argument to be?
But Cala, she doesn't *exclude* your (2), she just doesn't address it. Okay, sure; add science and tech careers to the examples she gives. Regarding (3), she addresses that too, albeit briefly: the beginning of her first piece was pointing out that women have stepped up to doing paid work, and men haven't stepped up to doing baby care and house work. That right there is the problem. And it isn't going to change as long as women are the only ones (as in Baa's 300) who are presumed to have to (or, if you want to make it sound nice, have the right to) make that balancing act.
there very well may be an innate conflict between happiness and the kind of power LH is talking about given how it is achieved in our society currently (through 80 hour work weeks) for at least some portion of the population.
Absofuckinglutely. And this conflict isn't LH's fault, or feminism's. It's the conflict that's the problem. We can accept it (which is perfectly understandable and human) or we can fight it (which is hard and difficult and requires a lot of sacrifice, maybe too much). But fighting it is the feminist choice, because that's the only way it's going to change.
And I think that the arguments about needing to create more flex time, have more balance on the job for everyone, etc. etc. (arguments I make myself and firmly believe in) have a disadvantage, in that they allow the kind of argument Baa is making--that is, women just happen to have different preferences, and there's nothing at all wrong with the fact that women need those accomodations, and the resulting continuation of men in all the top positions is no big deal.
I really do think that this is primarily an issue of tone. I liked Hirshman's arguments a lot, but I get my back up when someone confidently asserts a simple model for a complicated set of social processes. For example, I seem to recall that she mentioned the potential for divorce as a reason for women to worry about future income streams. But if she's going to do that, she needs to account for the fact that well-educated people who marry later in life--the women she's talking to--have much lower divorce rates than the general population. It may be that the threat of divorce remains an important method of control in undivorced families, but she ought to make that argument. To the extent that she doesn't, she's making claims I don't find rigorous enough to justify her somewhat strident tone.
This obviously only indirectly effects me, because I'll be ordering my bride on eBay.
304: Pretty much.
Baa- On your larger argument -- what if men and women just have different preferences? While I disagree with where you come out, I think it's the right question to ask. Someone who believes that women systematically have different preferences from men, leading men to money and power and women to nurturing and caretaking, is going to believe that an unequal society (from a gender point of view) isn't an unjust society. Men will have more money and power than women, and that's okay.
This isn't an impossible state of affairs, it's just one that I disagree with. But I'd like people who are advocating that women be left alone to make their own choices, which, oddly enough and there's no reason to think about social pressures, will generally be to move away from professional success and toward caretaking, to face up to it -- that the result of their advocacy is to move toward a society based on traditional gender roles.
Or I'll get teo to freeze your bank account.
Dude. I rank him.
But fighting it is the feminist choice, because that's the only way it's going to change.
I don't think working 80 hours a week as an ibanker constitutes fighting it any more than being a SAHM does. The only argument that it does constitute some kind of resistance is LB's, not Hirshman's (unless she says something different in her book), that there just won't be any more wives with less demanding careers for men to fob the housework off on to, and like I said, I find that unconvincing. If the expectations for work were different, however, that would allow people who value leisure and domesticity as a primary good to also have a public working life, and people who value a public working life as a primary good to also have leisure and domesticity.
Anyway, I look at the men who are working in those i banking/corporate lawyer jobs, and I don't think, "look at all those empowered men." I think, "patriarchy hurts men, too." Maybe it's just that I tend to meet people who are like me, but the people I tend to encounter in those jobs don't seem happy with them.
As for the philosphical point in 280, I'd say yeah in principle it is a function of language that can't be avoided; what Wittgenstein was getting at when he said "If language is to be a means of communication there must be agreement not only in definitions but also (queer as this may sound) in judgments."
In practice this is not always the case. Witters' example was that there's nothing you can say to someone that will necessarily get him to keep counting by twos the way you do; he might go 996, 998, 1000, 1004, 1008... and protest "But I'm just doing the same thing!" In practice that never happens.
Nevertheless, it's impossible even to enumerate all possible situations in which a statement might be applied. That enumeration itself would have to be done in language, which itself would have to be applied.
1. It's not just tone. Although LH does seem contemptuous of Ivy League women who opt to stay at home, there's a real (and important) argument about what a woman should feel her moral obligations are. As I read her, LH thinks a high performing women has a moral obligation to work outside the home, or in an "important" field, even if this is not what she personally would most prefer to do. Do any of the LH defenders (LB? BPhd?) think I am misunderstanding her point?
2. Per BPHD's 305. Obviously, men can and do have to make tough choices about family/work balance as well. I am not trying to suggest that the burden of child care need fall, or should fall only on women. Rather, I am trying to get some sense that LH supporters acknowledge the possibility that women and men might, on average, have diferent preferences, and that if so, asking women to ignore this will impose substantial costs on them. This means they have every reason to weigh carefully the benefits provided (to them, to society) of the moral obligation LH alleges.
I think my 307 addresses your 312.
this conflict isn't LH's fault, or feminism's
It's been a while since I read the Hirshman piece, but isn't she claiming that right now the path to your flourishing is by taking that job that demands massive sacrifices, without truly acknowledging that it in itself reduces your happiness in the short term? That's where the disdain for other choices doesn't make sense to me. In this moment in time, they're rational choices. Yeah, maybe if we all started pursuing power we would eventually change this (although even that isn't clear) but right now, they make sense.
That is, we don't seem to be preserving the time lag or individual versus collective distinction here.
You, the individual woman, can put yourself through the grinder right now, and do whatever you need to do in order to have a great career and kids--find a stay at home dad, whatever--but even so, in the short term this may not be the most enjoyable job in the world, your interest in its goals and rewards have to be that much higher because it is so demanding, and I don't know how much joy you derive from feeling you're making a difference, if you can't personally see its effects.
So some less harrowing path is, in the short term at least, appealing.
And one thing about teaching or social work is that you get an immediate sense of making a difference on the lives of people around you. Which is not to say that it ultimately makes more of a difference, just that from the individual's point of view, in the present, it makes some sense.
I'd like people who are advocating that women be left alone to make their own choices, which, oddly enough and there's no reason to think about social pressures, will generally be to move away from professional success and toward caretaking, to face up to it -- that the result of their advocacy is to move toward a society based on traditional gender roles.
I think you are simultaneously giving many of us who disagree with you and Hirshman too little credit and giving Hirshman way too much credit.
1. As I remember it, there was general (maybe universal, I do not remember) agreement that Hirshman was right in pointing out that it was problematic that many women who had choices were choosing to follow traditional gender roles. While this does not prove that they were not making free choices, unconstrained by thousands of years of cultural history, but it is pretty darn suspicious, and should make them, and us, reassess whether (who has a link to that Doonesberry cartoon) the feminists' goals have been met and everyone has thrown off the chains of sex-based behavioral expecations. To the extent you are claiming that this point is lost on those of us who disagree with you, I bellieve that your argument is misconceived.
2. For me, the problem is what Hirshman wants as away to deal with this problem she has identified. And here is where I believe you cut her way too much slack. She does not want to free women from their chains, she wants to forge new ones. Henceforth, real women make partner. They marry down so that they have a man to treat as a means to their professional ends (how can we miss the irony of this clever role reversal) and focus on the money, just like men.
The problem is that changing the shape of the chains is satisfying only in the sense that it increases the share of wealth and power available to women as a class, but it does little to advance justice, or a world where people can choose what to do with their lives free of expectations based on their sex--and, just as important--where those choices will be respected.
3. If you disagree with the last sentence in two above on the ground that giving women more power and money will fix all of the other problems of sexism, I think you are wrong for a variety of reasons. First, if the problem is sex-based expectations of behavior, keeping sex-based expectation but merely changing what the expectations are will not eliminate them any more than rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic would have kept it afloat. Second, such an argument must, ultimately, be based on the notion that women are simply superior and more just than men (and I realize that this is an argument that is for reasons that elude me considered respectable these days) and if only we could shift the power to them, they would ensure that justice would flow like water to the parched lips of the victims of the patriarchy. I respectfully disagree with that premise, but if that is where you are coming from, it should be stated explicitly.
Likely there are other reasons why replacing one set of sex-based expectations with another is a good idea and is the path to justice. I would like to know what those reasons are.
>The problem is that changing the shape of the chains is satisfying only in the sense that it increases the share of wealth and power available to women as a class, but it does little to advance justice...
It also does little to solve our growing oil crises. What about peak oil?
In practice this is not always the case. Witters' example was that there's nothing you can say to someone that will necessarily get him to keep counting by twos the way you do; he might go 996, 998, 1000, 1004, 1008... and protest "But I'm just doing the same thing!" In practice that never happens.
There are many things you can say to someone who tels you that not all odd numbers (n>2) are prime.
But I'd like people who are advocating that women be left alone to make their own choices, which, oddly enough and there's no reason to think about social pressures, will generally be to move away from professional success and toward caretaking, to face up to it -- that the result of their advocacy is to move toward a society based on traditional gender roles.
Well, I'd advocate that everyone be left alone to make their own choices. And I think that in the end we would move towards a society in which some men stay at home, some women stay at home, some men work, some women work. In which parents swap around working, not working, both working full-time, both working part-time, and so on. Of course there are social pressures to be overcome, but I think there is as much pressure on men, as at least women these days have (the illusion of) choice.
Not everyone is motivated by money and power. Not everyone wants these high-paid, high-powered jobs. And I still don't think that me doing what Hirshman wants (which would wither my soul) rather than what I want (to hang out with my kids) is going to benefit me, my family, or society as a whole.
Anyway, it's 9 pm here, and still too hot to think. The furry mice dolls mentioned above sound as if they were probably Sylvanian Families - they may be called Cottage Critters, or Country Critters or something else unappealing in other parts of the world? And I don't think playmobil women used to have a bosom (that's the only word for what they now sport), just slightly longer tunics.
I keep thinking the title of this thread is "Tolkien Women".
Sorry LB, cross posted with your 307. That's helpful. I think, as Idealist has already noted, that they key move is one from increasing gender equality in income and increasing "justice" broadly. If we stipulate that these are connected, there's then the marginal cost issue. How willing a woman will be to take a job she doesn't prefer on "pro-justice" grounds will depend a lot on how much justice she thinks increasing her income, and female influence will buy.
If we stipulate that these are connected, there's then the marginal cost issue.
Note that ac also references this issue in #314.
318 -- thanks for confirming my recollection re. Playmobil titties.
317 -- this is going to make public-key cryptography way easier (or harder? not sure) to crack.
Nah, it's just going to make public-key cryptography impossible.
Well, or everything would be encrypted with the number 2*p, making p super-easy to crack.
It's been a while since I read the Hirshman piece, but isn't she claiming that right now the path to your flourishing is by taking that job that demands massive sacrifices, without truly acknowledging that it in itself reduces your happiness in the short term?
This seems like an argument with the same flaw as: "My life as a teenage girl trying to get dates will be easier and more fun if I bat my eyes and play dumb around the captain of the football team -- boys don't date smart girls." To a certain extent, this is true -- gender expectations are powerful, and playing along with them is the path of least resistance. If you're looking to maximize short-term happiness, feminism is not necessarily the way to go. I think the long-term rewards, to the individual and to society, are great enough to make the individual effort worth it, but I haven't got an argument that can compel you to agree.
We were talking on one of the threads yesterday about persuasion, and who could be persuaded by arguments anyway. It occurs to me that this issue is one of the first I can remember in a long time where I've been persuaded to change my mind about which side I'm on pro or con. I started out pro-Hirshman, and the arguments against, coming from several directions and points of view, over several threads, in context of what was being said on her behalf at the same time, have convinced me to change my opinion. I won't defend it, as there have been lots of arguments, but I've come to realize my feelings have shifted.
You've changed your mind about whether she's right, or whether she's misogynist?
Take it out of the gender context for a second, LB. Isn't the French vision of life considered ideal? Having a career, pursuing a public life and some glory and glamour, making a difference, but balancing it with home life, taking lovely vacations in Normandy, eating food outside, having philosophical conversations with your friends over a glass of wine, &c. &c. Isn't that kind of the internationally-recognized picture of the good life? Is it insane or even all that girly to want to individually pursue such a life? And yet you assume that the only reason people wouldn't want to be a doctor who catches 8 minutes of sleep here and there or a corporate lawyer because she's ill-informed, or has a dating-the-football-captain mentality. That seems to assume, unnecessarily, that women are idiots. Which goes back to my original point.
Can't really untangle the two; my shifting feeling about the latter has an influence on the former. More like whether it's helpful and useful to debate on these terms, and whether this argument of hers has a salutary effect.
329: Sure, and I've said as much, repeatedly -- working 80 hours a week is unnecessary and stupid. I would like that expectation, for everyone, to change as much as the rest of you. I'm all in favor of the French way of life. But: in the society we live in now, elite women (on average) don't, and elite men (on average) do. And as a result people who have power are (vastly disproportionately, although not absolutely universally) men, and highly educated people living a professionally undemanding life at a significantly higher standard of living than they could swing on their own earnings are (again, disproportionately) women.
If la dolce vita is the good life, it's the good life for men as much as it is for women. If power is desirable, and many say it is, it's desirable for women as much as for men. And I think the choice between them should be made consciously, and with a deliberate effort to disregard the gendered pressures on us all.
Hirshman is pointing out the life decisions which irrevocably put women on track for an undemanding and unsuccessful professional life -- she's not saying that art history schools should be closed down, she's saying that you shouldn't feel comfortable majoring in art history because, as a woman, you know you won't ever be all that committed to a professional life, so might as well do something fun. If you (male or female) want to be a dilettante (I need to find a synonym for this), go ahead, but don't let the assumptions surrounding being female ease you into a lifetime of dilettante-hood.
315: First, if the problem is sex-based expectations of behavior, keeping sex-based expectation but merely changing what the expectations are will not eliminate them any more than rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic would have kept it afloat.
If the expectations of behavior are the same for both sexes, are they still sex-based? Because that's all Hirshman is advocating.
326: Playing dumb to date football players is one thing, and is likely to make you yourself unhappy in the short run. Throwing yourself into an 80-hour-a-week job you don't like is another thing, and is much more sacrificing yourself for the movement. Plus, as some of us have been arguing, this sort of individual sacrifice isn't the best prescription for the movement; collective action for public day-care would do more for gender justice (and here patriarchy hurts men too!). Yet Hirshman (unlike you) disdains that too.
So fighting gender expectation can be good. But you're not persuading me that taking the job that requires massive sacrifices in general has long-term rewards for the individual, or for society, or for feminism.
If you (male or female) want to be a dilettante
[Raises hand]
Plus, as some of us have been arguing, this sort of individual sacrifice isn't the best prescription for the movement; collective action for public day-care would do more for gender justice (and here patriarchy hurts men too!).
It's not a tradeoff, though -- there's nothing inconsistent about following Hirshman's advice and engaging in collective action for public day care.
[Raises hand]
Isn't that the bitch of it, though? All the attractive older women who are dedicated to their careers just seem determined to only date or marry someone even more driven and successful than themselves. There's certainly no shortage of well-educated guys who would like to be taken care of and raise the kids. I remember my ex at MIT saying that nearly all her guy friends wished they could hook up such a deal instead of going into consulting, engineering or i-banking.
Didn't see 331. I think Hirshman slides back and forth between "don't be a dilettante" and "don't be anything but an i-banker or lawyer." And her rhetoric makes it sound a lot more like she's saying the latter; as does your comparison of the woman who rejects those jobs with the girl who plays dumb. (Given the headline quote, 326 was specifically about rejecting massive sacrifices.) This is hostile to women who'd prefer the middle ground between i-banker and dilettante, and as per SCMT's comments upthread colors my perception of where she's going with the argument.
As for the tradeoff: a) Pollitt (linked in 270) said Hirshman disparaged collective solutions. Do you think she was mischaracterizing her? Those solutions seem like they'd help women who aren't following Hirshman's preferred careers as well. b) Collective action seems like it would be much more helpful to feminism than throwing yourself into the meat grinder, even if both can be done. But in 326 you seem to be identifying feminism with the meat grinder rather than the collective action.
There are two problems with Hirshman's argument:
(1) No one's sure it's an accurate reflection of the way the world actually works; and
(2) Few are the people who willfully sacrifice their lives in the pursuit of a life they hate for the greater good.
Look, you can flip the argument you make ("If you (male or female) want to be a dilettante (I need to find a synonym for this), go ahead, but don't let the assumptions surrounding being female ease you into a lifetime of dilettante-hood.") around: if you go into a field purely for money, with little other payoff, that's fine, but you really shouldn't need the moral payoff that you're "doing it for the sisterhood" to do it.
You can further make a weaker form of Hirshman's argument towards a class of men. On a bet, most of the academic males here are more likely to support women's rights than the general class of males in the field of I-banking. Should they be forced to go work at hedge funds (as I believe Neil the Ethical Werewolf once did) or consulting firms (as baa suggested to w-lfs-n)? Maybe. But I bet they're not going to do it, and not going to feel particularly bad about not doing it.
Given that Hirschman is giving advice that has for years been followed successfully by people who have done very little to cut back on 80 hours/week work expectations, it is not clear that the people who follow her advice successfully will be the same as the people who advocate for a loosening of work requirements and more public support for childcare. Such advocacy is not mutually exclusive with her advice, sure.
What Pollitt said about Hirshman was:
That said, there's something refreshing about Hirshman. Why should the antifeminists monopolize the high ground? It's about time someone asked, again, such basic questions as: If cleaning the house is so fulfilling, how come men don't want to do it, and how can you get them to do it anyway (cf., milk, obliviousness to lack of)? And if having a mom at home is so beneficial to kids, how come even Flanagan admits she could see no difference in children raised by stay-homes and working mothers except that the working mothers' kids seemed smarter?
and
It's about time feminists pointed out that equality at home and on the job takes planning. Hirshman's gotten flak for advising women to have only one child, and only with a man who agrees to be an equal parent. (As it happens, most of the professionally successful mothers I know have two kids.) But a few months ago the New York Times front page featured an upscale businesswoman who was astonished to find that having a third child sent her careful balancing act tumbling down. How, I found myself wondering, could that have come as a shock?
and
But really, isn't the stay-home vogue at bottom a response to the fact that society has failed to adapt to working mothers? Isn't choice feminism itself a way of dealing with the whole complex range of resistance to women's equality, by throwing up your hands and saying, Let each woman make her own tradeoffs? Unlike Flanagan, who wants women to give up the struggle, Hirshman wants individual women to fight harder and smarter, and that's great.
Hardly wholesale condemnation.
What Hirshman says about day care is:
Lefties keep hoping the Republicans will enact child-care legislation, which probably puts us well beyond 2030. In either case, we can’t wait that long.
She's not mocking the idea of subsidized universal day-care as a goal, she's pointing out we haven't got it and aren't going to get it soon. Politt chides Hirshman for not focusing on this point, but there's nothing wrong with pointing out that we've got to do something until the revolution comes.
I'm a little bemused by the characterization of money, and power, and professional success as a great sacrifice and a meat-grinder. There are those who think of those things as goods -- to the extent that they are absolutely not worth the effort, there are an awful lot of self-deceiving men out there.
I just noticed that I keep putting a c in Hirshman's name. Which is wrong.
Given that Hirschman is giving advice that has for years been followed successfully by people who have done very little to cut back on 80 hours/week work expectations,
No, it really hasn't been followed successfully. Women overwhelmingly do not run (for example) law firms. You can't say that there is no effect from having women in positions of power, because it still largely hasn't been tried.
Lefties keep hoping the Republicans will enact child-care legislation
is a bizarre statement.
342: In that statement: people who've followed the advice successfully = men.
There are those who think of those things as goods -- to the extent that they are absolutely not worth the effort, there are an awful lot of self-deceiving men out there.
Those men are self-selecting, though. Maybe there are cultural forces deceiving them into thinking they're happier that way, maybe not. But, by and large, men aren't told that they're immoral for not choosing those careers. Those that do probably don't see it as such a sacrifice. Individuals vary.
I think the choice between them should be made consciously, and with a deliberate effort to disregard the gendered pressures on us all.
Comity!
If the expectations of behavior are the same for both sexes, are they still sex-based? Because that's all Hirshman is advocating.
No comity. I do not read Hirshman as saying that at all. Indeed, it is contrary to her argument that women need to marry down to find someone to serve them while they (the women) achieve money and power. By the terms of her argument, she has different expectations from women and men. Further, the argument fails because Hirshman makes clear that going after the money is something women (as women) must do. If that is not a sex-based expectation, I do not know what is.
Finally, if Hirshman really thinks that all people need to go after the money and the power, that might be a sex-neutral expectaiton, but, IMHO, I certanily disagree that it shold be an expectation.
Indeed, it is contrary to her argument that women need to marry down to find someone to serve them while they (the women) achieve money and power. By the terms of her argument, she has different expectations from women and men. Further, the argument fails because Hirshman makes clear that going after the money is something women (as women) must do. If that is not a sex-based expectation, I do not know what is.
She's addressing women who have prepared themselves for professional careers, not all women - she's not expecting a brave new world where no one is a plumber. "If you want a high-powered demanding professional career, marry someone who doesn't," is perfectly gender-neutral advice. She addresses it to women rather than men because men largely do that already.
By the terms of her argument, she has different expectations from women and men.
I don't think that's true, either. She has different expectations for different classes. Or different expectations for different levels of "merit," which often resolves to the same thing.
I should drop this, I'm not convincing anyone. (Apparently I've lost IDP, for one.)
But I still don't think that Hirshman, or my defense of her, was remotely misogynist.
There are those who think of those things as goods -- to the extent that they are absolutely not worth the effort, there are an awful lot of self-deceiving men out there.
Maybe. I am someone who did the hard work to be a law firm partner. It was a choice that I made knowing the many sacrifices. I think that it was the right choice for me, but I know that there are many people for whom it would be a miserable choice. Knowing these things is the opposite of self-deception.
349: That looks pissy, in retrospect. I'm not stalking off in a huff, just tired and feeling as though I'm arguing ineffectively.
She is equating money and power, and when giving examples of career choices, she doesn't say simply 'avoid the soft options', she points towards 'acceptable careers', presumably ones where you'll really be able to lord it over that man you married down.
This one just seems silly. Pregnancy is 18-27 months out of most women's lives, and you can travel fine for most of it.
If it's so silly, then why does Hirshman only recommend having one kid? And what guy takes two to four years out of his career with no problem? (I am worried about my mental acuity while being pregnant. The pill makes me slightly stupid, and that's a lot more hormones.)
Here's what I've seen: my friends who went into intense, high-powered careers did it for about three-five years after graduation. They found it nasty and exhausting, which seems a sane reaction. They married and now have lots of money between the two of them. They want a family, but the career path they're on is nasty and exhausting and they didn't like it so much anyway. A baby seems like fun.
The women in less intense careers/more flexible seem to like it more. A baby seems like fun, but they're not hating their current jobs and they want to keep the jobs as part of their lives. If I had stayed in consulting, I very likely would have dropped out had I not made partner by the time I was thirty because it was nasty and exhausting. I'm in the academy now and assuming I find a job I'm not giving it up for anything.
This is why I think she's giving bad advice. She's assuming that if a woman wants to have a career that works well with motherhood (by "well" I mean "will see child more than at bedtime"), that the woman is making plans to drop out. But the argument works the other way: if you pick an exhausting career and you haven't properly driven your biological clock out of you, you're setting yourself up for a war between your desire for a family and your job, and ten bucks says the job loses everytime because 80-hour weeks suck. "Natural" or "society expects a woman to quit her job" aside, that's how it works right now and Hirshman is deluding herself if she thinks only the humanities types drop out or that the ibankers can better resist dropping out.
And that's all without addressing the fact that if she's looking for a career for social change, a social worker helping girls work through body image dysphoria is probably doing a lot more than the banker.
>I'm a little bemused by the characterization of money, and power, and professional success as a great sacrifice and a meat-grinder.
I agree. Typically, the more money you make the greater the sense of control you have at work and the happier you are.
Just to add to Matts 333, there are gender expectations that we find in themselves objectionable (girls are dumb) and those which do not seem essentially negative. That's what separates play dumb for the football player to get enjoyment, vs. drop out of partner track to get enjoyment. There's nothing, pace Hirschman's (bogus!) arguments about human fulfillment, objectionable about dropping out of the partner track.
It is of course true that a woman dropping out of the partner track may make it incrementally more difficult for the next woman in the partner track. The question is: how much do we care about this and why. I care a lot about explicitly discriminatory behavior (the stellar associate gettting crappy assignments because "we know" women drop out) or a closing of options to women (no women getting into top tier firms because "we know" women drop out). There are other remedies for this problem, which do not include women choosing high-achieving jobs they do not want.
353: But only until you reach a certain level, right?
In any case, my forthcoming article "Price waves and lunch counters" will demonstrate the importance of banking and currency exchange to the civil rights movement.
Typically, the more money you make the greater the sense of control you have at work and the happier you are.
Your milage may vary.
(I am worried about my mental acuity while being pregnant. The pill makes me slightly stupid, and that's a lot more hormones.)
I've dropped out of this argument for a bit, but on this specifically I wouldn't let it worry you. I had noticeable pregnancy effects, but they were along the lines of increased ditsiness rather than lowered IQ -- no difficulty with academic or professional work, just a hell of a time keeping track of my keys, if you see the distinction. Anecdotally, from friends, my experience seems to have been typical. YM, as always, MV.
Ok, am I really the only guy who is enough of a pig to be concerned about the double standard?
But the argument works the other way: if you pick an exhausting career and you haven't properly driven your biological clock out of you, you're setting yourself up for a war between your desire for a family and your job, and ten bucks says the job loses everytime because 80-hour weeks suck.
So the 80-hour work week gets pushed off on the guy, that poor bastard. After all, the woman needs to spend time with the kids and someone needs to pay for the nice house and private school. Hirshman seems to say that if you want the income and lifestyle that comes with a high-prestige high-powered job, you should be willing to work for it.
I believe this will help out equality in the workplace, making it easier for women to obtain the top jobs in the future. But I also relish the idea of a large number of high-earning well-educated women out there taking on 80-hour work weeks so that I too could live the dream of taking on a fulfilling low-demand job while I raise our child. Is that way too sexist to ask for?
I believe this will help out equality in the workplace, making it easier for women to obtain the top jobs in the future. But I also relish the idea of a large number of high-earning well-educated women out there taking on 80-hour work weeks so that I too could live the dream of taking on a fulfilling low-demand job while I raise our child. Is that way too sexist to ask for?
Nope. Ask my husband, who enjoys it a great deal. (Oh, he works full time at a very demanding job, but he works from home and gets to spend lots of time with the kids, and has the capacity to do what he wants and not worry too much about how much money he's bringing in because I'm at a law firm.) It works well for both of us.
Y'all are a bunch of crazy capitalists. Anyone who recommends an 80-hour work-week to anyone else is either kidding or malicious.
Killing infidels isn't work, pale face.
I've had stretches in my job where I've had to work 80-hour (and more) weeks, and that ain't living.
351 -- FWIW, I have greatly appreciated both this and the previous discussion of Hirshman and have thought that LB has made the case for the affirmative so successfully that I have felt no need to add anything.
I think that BPhD said something similar the first time around.
So, LB, you think you should feel like your arguments are unappreciated.
Editing glitch!
"you think you should feel like" s/b "you shouldn't think"
Personally, I prefer Eowyn to Arwen.
And Faramir is much cooler than wahwahi'malostkingAragorn.
#368, please don't post off-topic. This thread is about Tolkien women, right?
Seriously, Ogged, if your people had any gumption you'd have the bomb by now.
As I read her, LH thinks a high performing women has a moral obligation to work outside the home, or in an "important" field, even if this is not what she personally would most prefer to do.
No. She says that such women have an obligation as feminists to pursue something more than their own personal happiness; that is, to pursue money and power so that they can change the status quo rather than conceding to it. Women who aren't feminists don't owe feminism shit; she isn't speaking to those women.
if the problem is sex-based expectations of behavior, keeping sex-based expectation but merely changing what the expectations are will not eliminate them any more than rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic would have kept it afloat.
The problem is sexism, not sex-based expectations full stop. Specifically, the fact that our current expectations *just happen* to keep women in positions that increase dependence and *just happen* to keep men in positions that increase independence. If nothing else, swapping the roles will at least mean that more women are getting a better deal.
Second, such an argument must, ultimately, be based on the notion that women are simply superior and more just than men (and I realize that this is an argument that is for reasons that elude me considered respectable these days) and if only we could shift the power to them, they would ensure that justice would flow like water to the parched lips of the victims of the patriarchy.
No; it depends on the idea that women have a certain amount of self-interest and are more aware of the sacrifices women are supposed to make. And that therefore, if *enough* women get into positions of power, things will be way more likely to change than otherwise. I think this is true: it certainly seems to me that the current crop of Congresswomen is way more attuned to feminist issues than any of the men.
All the attractive older women who are dedicated to their careers just seem determined to only date or marry someone even more driven and successful than themselves.
That's why Hirshman tells these women not to be such idiots and to date and marry men who are less "successful." Which is excellent advice, actually.
FWIW, I had a really nice email exchange earlier today with Hirshman, who--bless her--was asking after my career. I told her about the leave, and about how much thinking of the very issues she brings up had shaped my thinking about my plans for it. She wished me the best.
I also had a really interesting chat a week ago with (one of) my stay-at-home sister in law, who is going back to school to get a nursing degree. She said that between the stuff I say on the blog and the Hirshman argument, she realized that with her liberal arts degree (in French) and her staying home because her software industry husband makes good money, she is really putting herself in danger if, god forbid, anything should happen to her husband.
That kind of stuff matters. I think it matters a lot. I think that women like Hirshman who tell us the hard truth are doing us more favors than people who make excuses for us. I really don't get arguments that excuse adults from being responsible for their own economic support. Sure, take a little time away from paid work if your partner can afford it. But it's foolish (and maybe I'm an insane Puritan capitalist, but it seems kind of morally wrong to me, too) to argue that there's nothing wrong with "choosing" to let someone else support you for most of your adult life. And I'm really really suspicious that this argument gets made so frequently when it comes to women's work/life balance, but virtually never when it comes to men's.
No. She says that such women have an obligation as feminists to pursue something more than their own personal happiness; that is, to pursue money and power so that they can change the status quo rather than conceding to it.
This seems like a false distinction, and one which makes LH's position seem weaker than it really is. Two points. 1) since LH thinks feminism is correct, and a great boon, I would imagine she thinks we have a moral obligation to be feminists. I mean, feminism isn't morally neutral, or optional , or just as good as an "up with patriarchy" position in her view, is it? If she does think one has an obligation to be feminist than the obligation to the rest follows (being a good person requires feminism which requires X, Y, Z). 2) LH thinks top achieving women aren't living flourishing human lives by dropping out, she likewise has an independent (moral) claim on the decisions of able women. So, I really don't think LH is issuing conditional imperatives to feminists only. Indeed, her great virtue is that she isn't wishy washy in this way: she thinks people have obligations, and that the Ivy League drop-outs are funking them.
Your comments on the need to seek power and influence are interseting to me, because I think they show that there's reallta question in the background abotu what feminism means, and whether it's about extending the sphere of liberalism or a more thoroughgoing political program. Just to step back, I would think that, as human beings, we all have an obligation to seek power and influence to better the world. And this obligation is something we all try to balance in our own lives with what actually makes us happy (c.f, the demandingness objection). What you seem to be suggesting is that feminism, as an ideology, requires one to be further along the spectrum towards public obligations and away from our own satisfaction than does simple humanism. Maybe, but that's a very strong version of feminism, no?
340: Pollitt also says: Hirshman's weakness is her assumption that the social problem of women's inequality can be solved if enough women make the right individual decisions. She mocks "the same old public day-care business that has gone nowhere since 1972."
I didn't mean to suggest that Pollitt was condemning women wholesale, but it certainly looks like she's making the criticism that Hirshman ignores collective solutions.
There are, of course, different versions of feminism. I hate the feminism vs. humanism argument, though, and don't wanna get into it; humanism is not political, whereas feminism is. Feminism explicitly recognizes that women have historically been perceived as less-than-human, and seeks to change this; humanism (when opposed to feminism), ime, ignores this fact.
But in fact, she says herself that she is speaking of feminism. And my reading of her, as a feminist, is that one of the basic foundations of feminism is that whole women-seen-as-less-than-human thing. So the public obligations vs. simple satisfaction dichotomy is a false one. As members of an oppressed class, everything women do is *not* perceived as "our own satisfaction." If it were, Hirshman's argument wouldn't bother people at all, and there wouldn't be counter arguments about whether women staying home with kids demonstrates that women care more about these things, or that there's some innate problem with careers for women; it really would be just an unremarkable difference, like whether one prefers blue or green.
In other words: if you're not a feminist, then you don't see (or, I would say, recognize) your "choices" as having political significance. If you're a feminist, then you should. In which case, copping out with the "but feminism is all about choices" thing is a cop out. It would be true if we'd achieved equal status, but we haven't; and until we do, then pretending we have means ignoring reality.
To the extent the argument LH makes makes sense, it's in this: we do not yet have a situation in which women have a meaningfully free choice to stay at home versus work. Pace baa, we're just not at the point where we can put it down to biological imperatives and assume that all the women are dropping out because they want to.
Pick five women, and even the hyper-educated successful ones can probably point to many instances in their lives where they were told a career wasn't a good option for girls, or they had to make sure how they'd raise a family with whatever career they'd have. My parents still seem to be expecting me to be a stay-at-home mom (and the überprof with the brilliant career. cognitive dissonance, thy name is calaparents. it's like they alternate expectations based on the days of the week.)
To the extent we say, sure, no one's holding a gun to your head but then pound in messages that good moms stay home and then the fact that 80 hour weeks suck, that's a choice, but it very well may not be a choice anyone woul'druther make if they had their druthers. It just happens that faced with a lifetime of obstacles and setbacks, women give up.
Must be the hormones.
I think LH oversteps and is wrong on the particulars. But I don't think she's wrong to say that it's a free choice like the colors of the model-Ts. You can have any color you want as long as it's black.
assume that all the women are dropping out because they want to.
You know what. I'm tired and that came out wrong. baa, you're smart. Analyze that like a incompatibilist counterfactual of freedom and you'll see what I mean.
373: Admittedly, this is a problem. And I am not sure if Hirshman thinks that individual action is *in and of itself* enough. I don't think so; I think she's arguing that individual action is what is needed to get individual women into power.
And it's completely true that her argument is a hard dose of medicine. And I for one think yes: all of us make our compromises, or we'd not be able to live in the world. My compromises are largely about appearance and presentation bullshit. I don't blame women for making compromises (although sometimes, like everyone, I get angry about it). But in addition to understanding types who say things like, "yes, we all make compromises, that doesn't make you a bad person" we really need the hardliners who say, "yes, it is hard to stick to your guns, but goddamnit, no one ever said it was going to be easy."
And to be fair to Hirshman, she puts her money where her mouth is.
And to be fair to Hirshman, she puts her money where her mouth is.
What? Isn't she a professor?
Three kids, philosophy Ph.D.? Husband supporting the book writing?*
*ducks**
**sorry, I had to.***
*** well, not really. i blame materazzi.
Three kids, retired professor of philosophy, law degree, influential public pundit.
Holy lord, there is more than one path to power and influence.
Yeah--that why I totally don't think she's saying we all have to be investment bankers.
Although I really do think that, broadly speaking, her advice to take more math and science and major in non-liberal artsy things is good sound advice. I saw an interview somewhere where she said yes, she had three kids, which isn't the advice she'd give others. Her arguments are based on studies across populations; of course individual women's lives aren't predictable by statistics, but if you want to increase the odds of success, fewer kids, a less-educated husband, and more math and science is gonna help.
Color me unconvinced. I have a very close female friend who's in neuroscience. She happened to work with a woman who's world-renown in her field, and she happened to be pregnant at the time. Dr. World Class, in her 50s, told her, unbidden, that she now wishes she'd had kids rather than the career. That could just be looking back in sorrow, but...color me unconvinced that it's quite as straightforward as Hirshman thinks.
Mostly my thought was that you get to indulge in an awful lot of misogyny in applying this argument—shaming and condemnation of those women not making the choice you want them to make. Even, it seems, when they're making their own living, and possibly doing something quite useful for society. Maybe it's all done out of ultimate sisterhood and hopeful expectation, but comes out pretty divisive and condescending.
So the public obligations vs. simple satisfaction dichotomy is a false one.
I don't think this is true. She seems to have a conception of fluorishing that looks a lot like the belief that active participation in public affairs is one's highest obligation as a citizen. I may be wrong, historically, because I don't know much about it at this point, but I associate this with "classical humanism" and republicanism (small r) going back to city-state republics. There's quite a lot that's appealing about this understanding of state and society, actually. What Hirshman seems to be adding is the market; earlier conceptions didn't value commercial relations much and stuck mostly to valuing governance.
I'm not at all familiar with the "humanism vs feminism" argument referenced above.
383: Sure, of course people are likely to have regrets. I don't think Hirshman is promising happiness, and I don't think that feminism is promising happiness. I think the goal is justice, which sometimes requires sacrifice.
384: See, I really think that that's blaming the messenger.
And I suppose ironically, at one point the humanities/humanistic studies was viewed as the appropriate preparation for public leadership. Scientists took the science classes and became scientists; future rulers were supposed to do the liberal arts. How times change. This is more a comment on the state of the humanities than anything else.
Although I really do think that, broadly speaking, her advice to take more math and science and major in non-liberal artsy things is good sound advice.
Unless you hate it or aren't any good at it. I-banking firms only take the top kids, not just anyone with an Ivy degree. I think where her advice is useful is just to develop the mindset that your career is not a hobby. Whatever you do, you're doing it to be the best in the field. You may not get there -- but her target is the hypereducated types, so maybe -- but you are not doing this as a pastime. And construct your life around that. If you need a rich husband, go get one. If you need a houseboy, get one of them. But this is not a pastime.
This is pretty much what Hirshman did. I don't get why she think it can't work for anyone else. She's a bright lady, but seriously.
Sure, of course people are likely to have regrets. I don't think Hirshman is promising happiness, and I don't think that feminism is promising happiness. I think the goal is justice, which sometimes requires sacrifice.
Looking at what I gather to be her life story--three kids, neither an I-banker nor a law firm partner, a partner who is not her income inferior--that sort of advice strikes me as vaguely similar to the Keyboard Kommandos telling potential soldiers that yes, young kids may die in Iraq, but sacrifices have to be made. They might be right; they're certainly right that people sacrifice their lives even in successful wars, and that that there are wars that must be fought. But color me unconvinced by their arguments.
387: I honest-to-god think that the movement of women into the humanities is entirely bound up with the downgrading of their importance.
388: Isn't that basically her advice?
People who want justice just like to fight. Ain't no justice.
I still haven't read the Hirshman, but there really needs to be a distinction between pursuing a career that will give the individual woman financial control over her own life, and pursuing a career that is somehow good for the sisterhood. Women should totally be encouraged to do the former, but the latter, with its sacrifice and indeterminate consequentialist benefits, just seems silly.
390: As long as your passion isn't art history or social work or humanities. This is why LH's tone is important; she's very dismissive towards the non-money-power-having-gasp-two-kids-with-a-weak-man-dependent-on-you-so-you-have-to-work
-just-like-those-unhappy-men-who-never-see-their-families..
Maybe she doesn't mean to, but her tone implies that this is the only way. And yes, if she didn't mean it that way, she should have modulated her tone. (But not because she's shrill.)
Tim, that's not fair. One of the abiding truths of feminism is that we learn from the examples of older women--both good and bad. And given that women were pretty constricted in what kinds of careers they were even allowed to consider not all that long ago, if we held out for a senator or investment banker with kids and a mastery of the social science and history of feminism, we'd be waiting another fifty years at least.
Dear God, but the Hirshman discussion has gone on for a long time.
The first part of 391 is overstated. There are women in the world in situations where it makes sense to make real sacrifices in the cause of justice. No one who reads this blog is in anything close to such a situation.
And I'm totally serious about the 80-hour week stuff. Feminism and anti-feminism aren't the only forces in play here. If we all sell out to capitalism while becoming a just and equal society, I'm not sure that's a good deal.
'Night!
391: True, there's no justice. But that's not a reason not to try.
I think it's wrong to say that it's silly to encourage people to think in political terms--after all, plenty of men do it. It's the primary route to power. If we want more women in power, and if we think that having more women in power will make things better for women as a class (I think both of those are true), then yeah, we need to encourage women to pursue things that are good for the sisterhood (read: society) as well as things that are good for them personally.
392: Sure. But most people don't pick their majors because they have a passion.
And I really think that saying things nicely isn't as effective as we'd like it to be. LB isn't writing books that are getting her coverage in major media organizations and forcing us to have this discussion. Hirshman is.
I never thought ogged would turn out to be a Kantian nihilist.
Look, there are plenty of ways Hirshman could have been just as forceful and made a sensible point. Again, she's not wrong because she's shrill, she's wrong and the shrill isn't helping because it's being shrill about the wrong things.
Second part of 395: Sure, that's a legit argument.
First part of 395, I think, is unfair.
398: Well, it helps me. And I think she's largely right. So at the very most, I think you can say that she isn't convincing everyone.
See, I really think that that's blaming the messenger.
Well, maybe. But I just got this eerie feeling in these discussions that misogyny is a constant. It can be converted from one form to another, but cannot be destroyed.
We're just not at the point where we can put it down to biological imperatives and assume that all the women are dropping out because they want to.
Hey Cala, I totally agree with that. So no worries about how you phrased it. I don't want to claim that our choice set now is unconstrained by (bad) sexist assumptions/institutions. The concern I have with LH on this score is that she appears to have dogmatic views about what the "true" state of preference will be. This leads to two potentially bad results. First, and less important, one can make bad inferences that lack of equal representation in field X necessarily implies unjust practicse. Second it seem to lead to a view that equal (or more equal) representation constitutes justice. This leads to offering very bad advice, which LH does in fact give, about how to achieve justice (be a law partner as opposed to a stay-at-home mom, e.g.). On this last, Ogged is simply correct about "indeterminate consequentialist benefits." LH is telling women they have a moral obligation to do X even if they want Y. This makes it very important to know if the benefit from X is substantial. I do not think LH meets that burden of evidence, or even tries very hard
(although in large part this is because she thinks law partner > stay at home mom on human flourishing grounds).